Epic Mickey Launched Today for Nintendo Wii!

In honor of Epic Mickey’s launch today on Nintendo Wii, we’re celebrating our epic journey in creating the fluid simulations for Mickey’s initial debut at E3 2010, here’s a bit of insight into the project….

For the awe-inspiring teaser that launched the eagerly anticipated Epic Mickey game at E3 2010, the Ant Farm and Disney Animation Studios relied on the boundless creativity and expertise of Zoic Studios.  As Mickey, the gamer is propelled into an alternate world, “Wasteland” –  a dark & brooding place where Disney’s misfit characters have been abandoned.  Wielding paint and paint thinner, Mickey dynamically changes this world while forging his path to becoming an epic hero. So the teaser for such a fantastical journey would have to heighten a sense of intrigue and anticipation in the gaming audience – a daunting task.

property of Disney Animation Studios

Inspired by Japanese artist, Shinichi Murayama, who builds mid-air fluid sculptures with high-speed photography, Zoic developed the idea of creating deep, saturated  throws of cg paint as “mirrors,” reflecting distorted images of the game. Disney wanted something that would surprise its audience and be “bold, beautiful, and just a little bit brooding.”

When you throw real paint into the air, it performs magically. It stretches and twists into graceful forms, pulling effortlessly into impossibly thin sheets. Thickened edges then form at the margins of the sheets and off those edges, thin, delicate tendrils stretch lazily into the distance, pulling apart into lovely strings of tiny droplets…  ZZZZZZZZZPPP! In the CG world, if you throw fluid into space it does none of these things. Instead, it immediately rips apart into unsightly ‘webbing’ that pretty quickly shatters into a cloud of droplets. No sheet, no lip, no tendrils. Now what?

Zoic turned to us to create realistic, elegant cg paint throws that could be sculpted and art-directed as they soared through space.  We often hook up with other vfx studios when challenging fluids work is needed. It was a perfect blend of creativity, technical know-how, artistry and team work.

property of Disney Animation Studios

We were able to make the cg paint form 1-particle-thin sheets using our “smorganic” plugin for RealFlow. “Smorganic” fills in the gaps in the fluid during the simulation process and maintains the flow at 1-particle thick.(http://lavalamp.fusioncis.com/2010/11/fantasmic-smorganic ). We used another technology we developed to detect the flow edge and push in sections to form the thickened lip, and yet another technology to pull small bits of the flow edge out into tendrils and eventually break them apart into droplets. With this set of tools, we’re able to keep mid-air flows impossibly thin for indefinite periods of time, make flow edges as thick as desired, and add in as many tendrils of whatever length and lifetime as needed.

property of Disney Animation Studios

Working closely and interactively with Zoic, we experimented in virtual space with hundreds of extremely high resolution, slow motion CG splashes to find just the right forms and motions to tell Mickey’s story – a story that unfolded against the backdrop of some of  our most advanced cg fluids work to date.

Zoic also needed to include speed ramps in order to get our “moments of suspension.” That meant that each splash had to be simmed out to 600-800 frames of animation and delivered to Zoic as high res meshes (resulting in more than 4 Tb of data).

The length and speed of the sims made it all the more important that our tools were working extremely efficiently, we had to create an abundance of fluid elements to give the creative director, Derich Witliff,  a lot to choose from as he built the spot. Each element ran for hundreds of frames and had to look good the whole time, and to be completely stable. Although the flows would be sped up to move quickly at times, for long periods they had to move achingly slowly, close to camera, across the frame — there’s no hiding behind motion blur or fast camera moves in a spot like this. Your CG fluids have to be perfect.  You decide.

http://fusioncis.com/projects/special-projects/epic-mickey

Fun with a tennis ball canon aka rigid body dynamics!

Mark is teaching a RealFlow 5 course for fxphd and always tries to make it interesting for the participants.  His latest class involves a tennis ball canon gone wild at a garden pinata party.  You’ll see some great rigid body dynamics in this super basic render, where the rigid body dynamics of RF5’s new Caronte solver is the real star.

The scene concept is: during a garden party, a giant tries to steal the pinata containing treasure, and a hero character uses a tennis ball cannon to smash the pinata before it can be stolen. The cannon then goes berzerk, shooting balls everywhere resulting in total garden party chaos! The big grey spheres are markers for the shoulder (upper one) and hand (lower) of the giant bad guy.

Mark is teaching a RealFlow 5 course for fxphd and always tries to make it interesting for the participants.  His latest class involves a tennis ball canon gone wild at a garden pinata party.  You’ll see some great rigid body dynamics in this super basic render, where the rigid body dynamics of RF5’s new Caronte solver is the real star.

The scene concept is: during a garden party, a giant tries to steal the pinata containing treasure, and a hero character uses a tennis ball cannon to smash the pinata before it can be stolen. The cannon then goes berzerk, shooting balls everywhere resulting in total garden party chaos! The big grey spheres are markers for the shoulder (upper one) and hand (lower) of the giant bad guy.

play pinata party!

Anyone taking the course is in for good time!  Let us know how you liked it.

Fantasmic Smorganic

CG fluid, especially “SPH” fluid (smoothed particle hydrodynamics), suffers from inaccurate physics at the microscopic level, at the scale of individual particles making up the fluid. Even when simulating with very large particle numbers, this becomes a major problem wherever the fluid becomes splashy since it forms thin sheets and strings — or rather, it should form thin sheets and strings, like we see in real water. Hi-speed macrophotography of fluid spashes classically show how delicate, impossibly thin and continuous sheets of fluid fly thru the air and stay coherent for prolonged periods. These produce tiny droplets and hair-like strings of fluid from their margins but otherwise hold together for a long time, before they eventually and suddenly burst apart. CG fluids on the other hand always break apart immediately, forming very unattractive and distinctly un-real cheese-like holes and webbing, never holding together in thin sheets. This has generally been the limit of CG fluid applications, and is what drives studios to have expensive table-top practical shoots, since CG fluids simply haven’t been able to reproduce the very particular small-scale features of real fluids — until now.

The movies below show recent r&d results from Fusion CI Studios that demonstrate a new technology for controlling the breakup of cg fluid, allowing us to simulate exceedingly thin, naturally organic fluid splashes.

movies:

This is what typically happens with cg fluids when you try to form thin sheets. In this sim we emit a thin sheet of fluid and bend it into a circular flow using a simple vortex force. It develops holes and breaks apart into small clusters of particles almost immediately.

When we apply our new dynamic hole-filling technology, the fluid stays as a fully coherent sheet for as long as we want. No holes! The method hunts for holes as they start to form, and fills in the gaps with new fluid. The key to this working is that the fluid insertion is done very precisely, so the simulation stays extremely stable.

How effective and how stable is this? We tried to break it — we simulated a fluid sheet being bashed violently by noise forces. This movie shows the meshed fluid, with almost no holes and running entirely stably.

Now let’s take it a step farther. Here’s 3 splashes, similar to classic hi-speed photography elements of water or paint. They form thin sheets and we add tiny streamers off their edges. Compare these to splashes of paint shown on stock element sites such as Getty Images. In the right-most element, we’ve applied randomness controls on the streamers and turn down the efficiency of the hole-infilling at different times for the inner sheet of the splash versus the outer streamers, so they break apart at different times (streamers first, then the sheet).

These splashes are very delicately structured, down to the smallest level of detail available to the simulation — the streamers and the sheet of fluid are all just 1 layer of particles thick. Since we can simply set the size of particles, this means we can make the fluid sheets as thin as we want. There’s no jerky motions due to the pollyfilla process, it’s as smooth as silk.

Just to emphasize that the results are very high quality visually, the link above is an example of one of the splashes meshed and ready for render. The mesh is smooth and shows no signs of jitter during motion. The smorganic process is turned off toward the end, allowing the SPH fluid to do what it usually does: break up. This was done to emulate the catastrophic disruption of such thin fluid sheets, that happens in nature when surface tension forces finally take over the fluid motion. We helped the disruption along by kicking the fluid with a strong noisy force field.

The image below is a render of a simulation of pouring “honey”, where we’ve set smorganic to disallowo any holes in the fluid. The results show the smoothness of the resulting meshes despite the high-spec, high-refractive nature of the shader and lighting, and despite a hard impact with a rigid body.


rd impact with a rigid body.