Tag: Fusion

The Wave of the Future – Small, Lean VFX Studios & a Kick-Ass Specialization!

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With Troubled Times in the VFX Industry, a Small, Highly-Specialized Team of Artists May Just Have Carved a Niche to Not Only Survive, but to Excel!

Splash Garden, Fusion CI Studios, RealFlow Simulation, Maxwell Render

Fusion CI Studios, a boutique vfx house in LA & Vancouver, specializes exclusively in cg dynamic fx – water, fire, smoke, all kinds of particles & destruction fx. Renowned as a world expert in dynamic fx, co-founder, Mark Stasiuk , is sought by studios around the world to create photo-realistic fx work for commercials, television and major motion pictures – The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (opening title sequence), The Three Musketeers, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Gulliver’s Travels, National Treasure: Book of Secrets, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and The Guardian, to name a few. Along with co-founder, Lauren Millar, Stasiuk has created a visual effects studio with a unique working model that just may be the wave of the future. They’re about to celebrate 10 years in this troubled industry, so they must be doing something right!

Their niche specialist team provides indispensable support to fellow visual effects studios around the world by performing as an instant, plug ‘n play fx team, fitting seamlessly into most effects pipelines and enabling studios to deliver advanced effects work, cost-efficiently, without worrying about software, personnel or infrastructure stress. Fusion’s innovations lie in the proprietary tools (scripts), methods and technologies that Stasiuk, with a PhD in fluid dynamics, has developed over years that make typical fx software perform far better than usual. One happy client calls Fusion’s work the “crack-cocaine” of the vfx industry, he says it keeps him coming back for more. In this exclusive interview, Stasiuk offers insights into Fusion’s success & strategies for creating leading-edge effects as an innovative, highly-efficient boutique.

An Interview With VFX Supervisor

Mark Stasiuk, PhD

Co-Founder, Fusion CI Studios

Mark, by looking at your amazing reel you’d think yours would be one of the most talked about effects studios around, yet we don’t see Fusion CI Studios in the vfx news regularly – Why do you think that is?

We sort of operate under the radar I guess you could say. Most of our clients are not movie studios or creative agencies, rather they are other effects houses who are awarded shots requiring photo-realistic fluid or dynamic effects. We act as a resource for them, a service. CG fluids in particular continue to be really difficult to do well. Getting a realistic behavior and appearance for fluids requires dedicated research & development on a long-term basis and when studios only occasionally do fluids or effects work, it’s tough for them to get up to speed to produce high-end effects work within a limited timeframe and budget. As schedules and budgets shrink, this issue becomes more and more prominent. Because we specialize exclusively in dynamics, we’ve developed a stable of very advanced technologies and tools that deal with the typical problems inherent in fx work, and in cg fluids in particular. These tools allow us to create a much better look & natural behavior much faster than even very experienced effects artists can achieve. And we customize these tools to respond to our clients’ specific creative direction.
We work as our clients’ instant, plug ‘n play effects team and we fit really well into any studio’s pipeline. So we’re kind of absorbed into their studio. Many of our clients don’t usually disclose to their clients that Fusion is creating the effects, so our work is often uncredited and I guess that might be why you don’t hear too much about us.

Can you describe your ‘toolbox’ a bit more?

Fusion’s work is based on physics simulations, which give fx a particularly rich, organic look and a level of complexity and detail that you just can’t get any other way (except by maybe blowing up your own buildings). Our work over the years has consisted of a whole series of innovations, developed out of necessity because this area of vfx is so challenging – we’re always asked to create effects that aren’t fully covered by any of the off-the-shelf software. As a result, many of the effects Fusion has done have been “firsts” they haven’t been achieved before with off-the-shelf software. And have most typically been achieved through practical effects. Things like: large-scale fluid simulations, floods of water down a hallway, u/w explosions, hyper realistic rivulets of water draining down temple walls, air-entrainment trails underwater behind plunging bodies, and macro-style slow motion hyper-real splashes of paint and highly art-directable fluid morphing (which has had tens of thousands of hits on our Youtube channel.) Each one of these was a first in the field. You can see a list of some of the tools & plugins we’ve developed on our website in the r&d section.

We’re doing this by building custom functionality into off-the-shelf fluid solvers like RealFlow. For some of these effects, big studios like ILM have of course done them, but not with off-the-shelf software. In other cases, the effects themselves have not been done at all in the field, at least to our knowledge. So this illustrates a new and exciting path for the vfx industry that we’re on the cutting edge of – building proprietary innovation into off-the-shelf software packages. By not having to create our own physics solvers from scratch, we’re able to bypass a massive amount of overhead that’s taken on by teams of research scientists at large studios. Instead, we work with developers like Next Limit who are responsible for building the base solver that can be used by anybody. We then develop our own particular innovations that allow us to be first in the field and allows them to create entirely innovative and unique methods and phenomena. So Fusion can compete in terms of types of effects with any studio out there. This means that even a small studio can do ground-breaking work without having to rely on pre-fab effects in software packages.


Smokin’ Pot, Fume FX Simulation, Krakatoa Render


So you take all that innovation, and you work as an “instant, plug ‘n play effects team” for your clients. How does that work?

Once we decide to work together with a studio, we have a call or skype meeting to thoroughly go over what’s required and really clarify the look and behavior that the director & vfx sup require. Then our clients supply us with whatever 3D assets the effects will interact with and we work to create the effects. Through phone calls, secure ftp, email and cinesync sessions (a brilliant technology, by the way!), we’re in constant communication with our clients, providing them with wips as we go along, getting feedback and revising, just as if we were their effects department down the hall in their own facility. We work that way with clients around the world from LA to the UK to Australia to Japan. One of the advantages of this approach for our clients is that our project bids are all-inclusive. So long as there are no major creative changes along the way that alter the scope of work, we hold to our quote and that helps our clients keep strict control on their budgets. Really important in the complex world of vfx where artist hours can go crazy when productions hit technical hurdles. And now that budgets are really squeezed beyond belief, it’s nice to be able to count on something.
We create simulations for our clients to light/comp and finish, or we can light and comp; we’re flexible according to whatever our clients prefer. Oh, and our core tools are Maya, 3ds Max, RealFlow, Houdini, Fume FX & Krakatoa and Maxwell, so we can easily work with most studios.


Swirling, Colliding CG Paint Simulations for Shilo, NYC. Valspar Paint.

There appears to be a strong tendency for many vfx studios to want to do everything in-house, especially once they reach a certain size, many studios feel it’s more cost-efficient to have everything under one roof. How does that affect your working model?

I’ve seen the pendulum swing back and forth on that one and it does seem to be swinging now toward having everything under one roof, particularly because there’s so much uncertainty in the industry right now, there seems to be a ‘circle the wagons’ mentality. Strangely enough, Fusion did really well during the recession because studios were being careful with their resources; rather than wasting money and time trying to create effects that were complex and unpredictable, they went with the sure bet and reached out to us to create the effects for them. That way, they could be certain that for the same cost as hiring effects artists to work in-house, they could hire us to create the effects and they didn’t have to worry about finding the right artists, using their infrastructure, buying additional software, etc. With the industry changing in unpredictable ways now, we’re seeing more studios wanting to have effects artists work in-house, but I can’t see how that’s more cost efficient for them than hiring us. I think it has more to do with wanting to be regarded as a one stop shop in a competitive cg market. There are always studios needing our help with effects work and we’re more than happy to be there for them. I think creating our own area of expertise, then collaborating with others on work that’s outside our area of expertise is the smart way to go and given the state of the vfx industry now, it might be the way of the future – stay lean, stay focused and collaborate – combine your resources to make something better than either could do individually.

You’re world renowned for your cg fluids work. The things you make RealFlow do with your python scripting are amazing, like the fluid morphing in the Whole Water Project, I love that one. But Fusion isn’t just about cg fluids, your studio specializes in dynamic effects. Can you tell us what projects you worked on that do not involve cg fluids work?

It’s funny you should mention Whole Water, that was several years ago now and we still often get that piece sent to us by clients as reference for how they want their creative to look. They’re very pleasantly surprised when they learn we created the morphing & the fluid simulations for The Department of Motion Graphics in Australia. Still one of our favorite clients to this day.

I think a Burn Notice promo on the USA Network was our break-out piece for dynamic effects work. That was the first time we got a lot of interest and feedback in that area. We worked with Go Film in Hollywood, a brilliant director, Andrews Jenkins, and an outstanding vfx supervisor, Eric Rosenfeld. It was a huge challenge to execute Andrews’s creative vision. Each element, including the actors, were laid in as separate comp elements and all had to be choreographed in reverse to make sure all the deadly effects — explosions, debris, bullets whizzing by — would not have someone walking right thru them. It was a lot more difficult to sort out than you might think.


CG Smoke, Fire, Destruction FX & Water, for Go Film, LA. Burn Notice, USA Network

After that we worked with Method Studios in Santa Monica to create a promo for Canon’s Imagin8ion Project -the contest to inspire Ron Howard’s next film. Method did an outstanding job on that piece and they reached out to us to create fire, smoke, and water effects for a couple of shots.

Those two projects really launched awareness of our dynamics work and we’ve gotten lots of destruction fx & fire & smoke in commercials, games, phone apps & films since then.

One of our greatest recent accomplishments with cg water was interestingly not for feature film work where we’ve typically do a lot of grand-scale cg water, but for a television series. Zoic reached out to us to create ocean simulations to combine with practical water shot in a wave tank for a stormy ocean scene in ABC’s Once Upon A Time, The Stranger episode. Zoic filmed a raft scene with a live-action Geppetto and a cg Pinocchio and needed the surrounding stormy ocean and waves hitting the raft to be cg. Geppetto and Pinocchio were also being stalked by a giant cg whale so Fusion needed to generate massive streams of water draining off the whale as it dove and surfaced and also make the whale’s skin appear wet & shiny. The challenge was creating these massive-scale sims on a tight tv schedule & budget. And despite the constraints, the creative called for photo-realism of course. But this is the kind of thing we really rock at, and we had a solid foundation of tools to build on, so we were able to optimize sim times and develop some amazing efficiencies. There’s a pretty detailed case study about that on Fusion’s blog. Zoic was nominated for a VES award and an Emmy for the effects in that episode, so we were pretty happy to have been part of their team.


ABC’s Once Upon A Time – Ocean FX Sequence for Zoic Studios-
Monstro’s cg tail flipping massive volumes of water


I see we’ve dipped back into water again…

Yes, sorry, occupational hazard! It’s what people associate us with and we’re trying to help our clients realize we specialize in a much broader area, so I should be careful about that! Actually most of the work we’ve been doing lately for game trailers and television series have been fire & smoke & destruction effects. We’re working on a massive explosion for a tv series directed by a very well-known feature film director, so the team is stoked about that. And we’ve been working on helicopter explosions and building destruction for a very popular game that’s about to launch. Our team loves blowing things up!

I understand Fusion CI Studios is weeks away from celebrating 10 years in the business! Congratulations, a great accomplishment, especially in these troubled times for vfx. What do you see ahead for you and the vfx industry?

Well that’s an interesting question… We’ve developed a very specific vfx niche where we excel that’s appealing to a wide range of clients – we work on commercials, game trailers, phone apps, art-installations, websites, television series, and motion pictures, so we’ve really diversified and kept our studio alive and thriving. Our willingness to share our dynamic fx expertise with any studio that wants to work together to make their product stronger has been a good working model for us. We don’t have grand designs to expand, in fact, we’ve fought against it. We want to be a lean, mean, specialist team that has a lot of fun doing what we’re doing and churns out great work. And we have some fun internal projects we’re working on to release for our 10th Anniversary, so keep in touch about that!

Small studios can specialize in areas of their expertise and still work on really amazing high-end projects which normally would go exclusively to the larger studios with their proprietary software. Provided you have some expertise you can leverage, you’re able to compete for some very advanced work.

Our work has been an inspiration for a lot of groups – like students and other artists who have used our on-line r&d resources for a lot of their project work. In addition, other artists, for example in the Houdini and RealFlow communities have seen our proprietary work as an inspiration that many have emulated and we’ve even influenced the development of RealFlow, for example, as Next Limit has used equivalent versions of our developments to add to new versions of RF.

Thanks Mark, that’s excellent, congratulations again on your 10 years in the business and we look forward to seeing more outstanding fx work from Fusion!

Fusion CI Studios specializes exclusively in dynamic fx for television, commercials, game trailers, art-installations and motion pictures, acting as a plug ‘n play fx team for vfx studios who need to expand their fx capacity & creating customized fx tools for their clients to achieve challenging, leading-edge fx. http://www.fusioncis.com/

310-928-1483 LA
604-673-6790 Vancouver
Info@fusioncis.com
www.fusioncis.com

Fluid Simulation Case Study: Valspar Paint Commercial

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Valspar Love Your Color

Valspar Commercial:  http://www.fusioncis.com/press/Valspar_halfHD.mov

When Shilo, NYC, approached Fusion CI Studios to create some highly art-directed, abstract fluid behaviors for a Valspar paint commercial, we jumped at the chance to work with their highly creative team.  The concept was a unique, beautiful and extremely challenging performance for fluid simulations, which had to blend together believably with practical paint.  The kind of effect Shilo was looking for has not been done before in RealFlow, so it was an opportunity to once again push the bounds of the software in an endeavor that was more performance-art for cg fluids than any commercial we’ve ever worked on.

In this spot, droplets of paint fall through air from a paint brush, colliding in mid-air to create splashes of paint that  then morph into complex spiralling shapes, again colliding in mid-air to reform into a droplet which falls with a delicate splash into a paint can.

Heart Morph

The .15 second spot required a descending paint droplet to morph into a heart shape, the icon symbol of the spot, with trailing tendrils and droplets, then re-morph  into a paint droplet which then cut with a practical droplet splashing into a bucket of paint.

The main challenge of this effect was that the fluid simulation was forced to perform in quite unnatural ways to meet the creative, yet still had to look as “organic” and realistic as possible, as if it really was a drop of paint falling through air, colliding with other droplets in space and ultimately forming a heart with lovely tendrils and droplets trailing behind.

To create this effect, the Fusion team opted to simulate the fluid motion, not actually falling through space, but sitting in place and behaving as though it was interacting with air-drag as it fell.  The cg team at Shilo modeled geometry of the heart and animated ripples across the surface to meet the exacting creative desired by the client.  Fusion’s team then morphed fluid to this geometry applying our smorganic tools to keep the fluid smooth and unbroken and the shape changed from a rounded droplet to the expanded heart form.

Movie of a heart morphing test:  www.fusioncis.com/press/ValsparHeartMorphTest.mov
Movie of final heart morphing: www.fusioncis.com/press/Valspar_DropToHeartMorph.mov

Fusion also developed a scripted droplet generator which created additional fluid within the morphed fluid that was permitted to “leak” out of the heart under a specific set of forces that emulated the effects of air-drag.  The droplet methodology had to be controllable enough to allow the Fusion artists to paint on locations of droplets and also to control very specifically the lengths of the tendrils before the pulled apart and got pulled away vertically into space.

Droplet Impact

For the .30 second spot, the creative was even more complex and beautiful.  This version introduced a third challenging effect — 2 droplets would collide in space, merging upon impact, swirling outward to form a concave downward umbrella structure which would then burst apart in a controllable way.  Don’t try this at home.  The original intent was to shoot this practically.  This is a great example of where cg can really help in these kinds of spots where control and specific art-direction is needed.  If you imagine how hard it would be to shoot 2 tiny droplets of paint at each other and hit each other in an aesthetically appealing way, you see the crux of the problem.  Never mind trying to get all the other exotic behaviors that happen after the collision. To create this effect, Fusion created 2 droplets of fluid and was able to do a precision launch of the droplets so they’d impact in a very precise way, just off center from each other.  This meant that the initial impact could be designed to create a splash that was already flattened and oriented in the direction of a vortex force field.

two droplets about to collide in space

 

 

 

Mid-Air Collision / Merging Droplets
Forming Umbrella Structure

 

 

 

 

 

Movie of a “droplet impact” test:  www.Fusioncis.com/press/Valspar_DropletImpact.mov


The team then used an adapted version of the vortex force field developed for the tentacle swirl above so that we could swirl the fluid outward and then instead of pulling tentacles upward, we pulled the edges of the entire swirling sheet downward to give us and umbrella like shape.  We then scripted an add-on to our “smorganic” toolset, allowing us to paint specific spots on the fluid sheet  where tiny explosive forces would happen momentarily to burst the fluid away from those points and generate the explosive degradation of the fluid sheet.  And finally, we used our standard smorganic tool to paint on locations on the margins of the sheet

to generate tendrils and droplets.  Once everything was put together, the overall effect was both very natural looking and quite spectacular.

Final droplet Impact movie:  www.fusioncis.com/press/Valspar_DropletImpact.mov

Droplet Swirl

For the next shot, “droplet swirl,” the Fusion team had to create an animated, mid-air sculpture essentially.  It was clear from the beginning that the only way to approach this was to abandon the native set of tools for forces in RF and build from scratch a force field that would sculpt the fluid into the shapes and the motion required by the creative.  The fluid needed to form a swirling vortex that would develop a set of arms or tentacles that would stretch outward then upward, spiraling around the center the entire time.  Fortunately, Fusion has its smorganic tool set which would prevent fluid from breaking up and allow us to add on droplets and tendrils coming off the margins of the tentacles, so it was really just a matter of creating a force field that would pull the fluid into a “tentacley” shape.  Easy, right?!  Fusion’s team set about designing a custom vortex field where we could use key framed curves as mappings to horizontal distance from the center of the vortex and vertical distance above the vortex.

  

 Early test of the collision /swirling/ reintegrating www.fusioncis.com/press/ValsparDropSwirlTest.mov

Final images, swirling droplets, from Valspar Commercial

This gave Fusion’s artists an extreme level of control in the character of the swirl above and radially away from the center of the droplet.  Next, to create the tentacles, we introduced a sub population of particles which would have a controllable variation on the vortex force-field strength.  And we created a method where we could paint on the areas where these particles would be selected.

So basically, where we painted on the fluid, those particles would have stronger vortex forces applied to them and they would pull away from the rest of the fluid, forming tentacles. Getting the variations in the tentacles was a matter of having painted on the particles which gave us a high level of control so that when the creative director let us know that the tentacles needed to be wider, narrow, or have more variation in size, we could implement the changes in a straightforward way.

In the actual spot, the tentacles had to spin out, away and up. And then with time, merge into a central tail above the droplet.  This was a matter of changing with time the vortex forces on the tentacles and droplets.  Finally, two of these

Final Droplet Impact Movie:  www.fusioncis.com/press/Valspar_Dropletswirl.mov

‘tentacle swirls’ had to be right beside one another and then toward the end of the shot, collide and merge together in a highly appealing way.  Rather than trying to have this happen by true physical interaction which would have broken up the sculptural look, the team chose to take 2 different sims of the swirls, animate the particle sets in space to come together at the same spot, and then meshed the two particles sets together to create the effect of the merging droplets.

This project is a great example of technology serving art-direction. In all the shots, Fusion had to build-up and evolve tools to address the creative target. It was tempting at various points to surrender to what seemed like technical limitations, but instead our client gave us space to work and we could re-approach the problems, eventually leaping over the technical barriers — sometimes the answers were simple once figured out, sometimes much more involved. It’s also a good example of how to build your tools. Always be thinking in terms what the client is likely to want in terms of changes, and then take the extra hour or hours to build in the controls that’ll let you revise easily. That approach paves the way for relatively painless revisions and releases, rather than straight-jacketing the creative process. After doing all that, it’s of course great to have a really strong end-game team to hand off the fluid assets, who could then create beautiful lighting and compositing; editing it all together to make an eye-popping result — our hats off to the Shilo team!

The finished spot: http://www.fusioncis.com/press/Valspar_halfHD.mov

 

Fin Design Shares a Coke with Fusion CI Studios!

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Fusion CI Studios Shares a Coke with Fin Design!

Coke bursting from a bottle, launching through the air in an elegant, dynamic, sculptured cg splash — super slow-motion and close-up!  This looks like a job for….. dynamic effects specialists, Fusion CI Studios!

When Fin Design + Effects, Sydney, Australia, (http://www.findesign.com.au ) was tasked to create this kind of effect for an end tag for the Coca Cola “Share a Coke” campaign, they turned to Fusion to create the cg fluid simulations because of our experience with macro-photography style CG fluids. Fusion has developed an extensive library of technologies and methods for these kinds of effects. Our clients come to us for challenging fluids work, so each project has unique, demanding requirements that pushes the bounds of existing technology and propels us to develop ever more advanced tools to meet creative expectations — the resulting extensive library allows us a good ‘leg-up’ on new project work.  Consequently, Fusion provides its clients with outstanding effects for about the same amount it would cost them to hire an experienced effects artist, while creating a far superior product.

The campaign invited people to send photos of themselves to be featured on TV- the photos would be grouped according to first names. Fin’s task was to find a design solution to showcase the photos that wouldn’t alienate the core concept and that would keep the pictures “Hero.” Fin imagined all the places one would normally see pictures of friends & family – on our phones, in a picture frame, on social networking sites, in a snow-dome, in a locket, etc – and created a series of shot options for the campaign’s TVC’s.  But when Ogilvy asked Fin to also create the new Coke endtag – “a celebration of the pop & burst Coke moment as the lid comes off the bottle,” Fin turned to Fusion to generate the fluid simulations.

Coca Cola is one the world’s most well-developed and iconic brands — everyone from a villager in a remote area of a developing country to Donald Trump knows exactly what coke looks like, so when it’s moving super slow with the camera super close-up, the cg fluids must be stellar. And of course they have to look like something you’d be excited about drinking — this is no small task with CG fluids, which are very challenging to create realistically and far harder to make look tasty.

Fusion was asked to create 2 kinds of mid-air cg fluid splashes for Fin: a splash bursting from the Coke bottle (which had to be sculptural and beautiful while also feeling explosive, pushing toward a chaotic feel), plus a variety of curving splashes that Fin’s team could compose in 3D space in the comp to create a dynamic “Coca Cola space”. So it was up to Fusion to experiment with digital “throws” of fluid and work up a palette of shapes from which Fin’s creative director could give further direction, and then select elements to build the 3D composition.

Fusion has created a wide variety of broadly similar mid-air splashes:

Iconic crown splashes: http://www.fusioncis.com/research/splashes/

Milk & juice splashes, Minute Maid NutriBoost: http://www.fusioncis.com/press/MinuteMaidNutriBoost_final_H264.mov

Paint splashes, Epic Mickey promo: http://www.fusioncis.com/projects/special-projects/epic-mickey .

Fusion’s basic splash technology makes use of our “smorganic” tool, developed in-house to prevent CG fluid from breaking up into ugly swiss cheese-like holes that is typical of CG fluids: http://www.fusioncis.com/pr_smorganic.html .

If you’re a RealFlow user you can think of Fusion’s smorganic as RF’s sheeter daemon on steroids. In addition, our splash tool finds flow edges and from these creates the little droplets and tendrils that are so characteristic of small-scale splashes. For the bursting splash, the shape was going to be so chaotic that our tool would create those features everywhere and turn it into a truly crazy shape, so we had to develop artist-friendly ways of controlling where the tendrils came off. We found a simple solution by just having artists paint over the particle cloud, highlighting those zones that would allow the creation of tendrils. Once this was done, it was a matter of creating interesting splash shapes using an array of tiny deflector planes just inside the mouth of the bottle and then running a matrix of tests to see what shapes were generated.

Here’s a link to a playblast of the final version selected by the Fin Design team:

 http://www.fusioncis.com/press/shareacoke/bottlesplash.mov

The arc-shaped splashes had a shape more like what we were used to creating, so our tendril tool worked as-is for those, allowing us to auto-select the flow edges and set the number and spacing of the tendrils. The challenge with these was to get controlled, curved shapes. For these we developed a new version of a path-follow tool to guide the flows in a natural way along a path in space. Again, RF users could view this as the Dspline tool on drugs.

An early version of a splash element with this tool created an element that didn’t end up being used in the spot, but illustrates the sort of look when the path was not too highly curved:

www.fusioncis.com/press/shareacoke/arcsplash_simple.mov

But when we really cranked the path-follow tool, we could get this kind of flow that you’d have to be in outer space to even think about re-creating practically (see below):

www.fusioncis.com/press/shareacoke/arcsplash_spiral.mov

 The above flow was a little too extreme to be used in the spot, but with some tweaking we got a spiral-sweep going that had a sense of more natural flow while still retaining the magic that can only come from CG:

www.fusioncis.com/press/shareacoke/arcsplash_circularsweep.mov

Fusion supplied Fin’s team with a library of about 15 of these kinds of fluid simulations delivered as mesh sequences, from which they picked out their favorite moments, added tiny particle-type bubbles to the fluid interiors, and built up the set of vignettes to create the final spot.

See it on Fin’s site here: http://www.findesign.com.au/projects/coke-share-a-coke/

Fusion’s site:  http://www.fusioncis.com/press/shareacoke/coke_shareacoke_h264.mov

Credits:

Fin Design + Effects

Surry Hills, Australia

www.findesign.com.au

 

Fusion CI Studios
Santa Monica, CA

www.fusioncis.com

 

 

Holiday Magic

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Click here to see some:

Holiday Magic!

We created an electronic Holiday Greeting card as a little internal project here at Fusion. Certain aspects of it were inspired by a recent SeaWorld spot we did in collaboration with Vitamin Pictures in Chicago. For that project, we created water branches that Vitamin then comped into a tree form.

We thought the idea of a dynamic, fluidy Christmas tree for the holidays fit us perfectly, since we specialize in CG fluids, so we extended and adapted the technology we developed for the SeaWorld project and built a little scene around it.

The blanket beneath the tree was created as a Maya nCloth simulation, the furry edge was done using Maya fur. The water branches were each done as 400 frame fluid simulations, using our newest technology for making fluids follow paths. This allows us to make fluid take contorted, art-directed paths while still maintaining a very natural flowing look.

The tools typically available for this kind of thing end up making the fluid look like a worm wiggling thru mid-air, which of course looks anything but natural when you’re talking fluids. So we developed a custom tool that allows complete control on falloffs along the path and with distance from it, variations in strengths along the path, and also allows the release of fractions of the fluid to create splashy edges. And of course the tool has integrated into it our “smorganic” tool ( http://www.fusioncis.com/pr_smorganic.html ), which prevents breakup of the fluid into ugly cheesey / webbed shapes. The tree was then built from about 30 unique fluid branches, each placed carefully in 3D space to get a nice tree shape while maintaining an organic look. This year, our tree decorating was virtual!

Working on the project at Fusion were: Mark Stasiuk, Matt Benson, Lauren Millar and Liz Catullo.