We’d have simulations of collapsing umbrellas with all the fine details and they would tear apart and then the wave would go into a cafeteria and we simulated Coke cans and plates and wrappers to blow away partially from wind of the wave and the wave itself.” Original Photography final shotĪlthough Scanline had developed previs for the sequence in consultation with Michael Owens, it was mainly used for very quick on-set reference by Eastwood, who shot scenes quickly and with minimal takes. In other areas where it was green grass, it would get that refractive feel of the grass and then slam into say a retaining wall, throw that heaviness away and then hit say the umbrellas at the resort. The water actually picks up the material of what’s underneath, like the sand, to make it look different and be a little heavier than white water. For the big crashing wave on the hotel resort, we came up with a new technique where it is not just white water that rolls in. “We replaced the ocean water so that there wasn’t a long sandy beach,” said Trojansky, “because at first the water disappears and then comes back. Scanline stitched together photography to build up the beach setting and resort. Visual effects for the initial flooding of the hotel resort started with reference from a plate shot in Maui. We then had to loosen up the constraint so that a few feet away it actually could do what it was doing in the overall shot – interacting with floating cars, dead bodies, collapsing buildings, additional flows of water.” Original Photography final shot “For one part of the sequence that we called the ‘Tea Cup’ sequence, like one of the rides at Disneyland, we had to tell the water to behave exactly like the motion-captured water movement of the live action water when it was very close to her. “Actually, the swirls became very significant in an artistic way,” added Trojansky. “For the main shots what we had to continue to develop was the ability to track the live action water in the live action plate, getting some kind of motion capture of the actress by rotoscoping her, tracking the waves partially by hand, partially by optical flow techniques and converting them into 3D space – and then using that bit of information we can get out of the live action and adding it together with the overall motion of a huge tsunami wave down the street with all the turbulence and flows.” “We realised that the control this time was needed for constraining the fluid simulation to the live action water,” said Trojansky. A large percentage was also based on developing new tools to adapt to the actual artistic challenges. It lets us get a performance speed on a single workstation of a factor of 20 that was once something previously done on a CPU.”Ī certain percentage of development time was spent by Scanline on increasing the efficiency of Flowline and taking advantage of new hardware and software environments. We can already run a huge part of the actual computation and simulation on GPU and mix this between GPU and CPU. “We’re working right now on the next generation of the software. “We have a team of software developers who are constantly working during the show on improving Flowline,” said Trojansky. As a node-based system, developments made to Flowline on previous shows could be easily ported to work for Hereafter. Still, Scanline leveraged previous R&D efforts on its proprietary Flowline simulation software, which is built into 3ds Max and V-Ray for rendering. There weren’t meant to be any shots about waves or buildings collapsing, it was just there and happens as the camera passes by. In fact, although we did so many intensive water effects and destruction and buildings falling and tearing cloth, for this movie they called it ‘incidental background destruction’. “So with every new show it’s more about the artistic challenges of it – not just how to do things like spray and dynamics and scale. “As a company, I think we feel we have resolved how to simulate water and make it look realistic in any kind of scale,” said Scanline visual effects supervisor Stephan Trojansky. To create the requisite tidal wave, resulting water effects and ensuing destruction, overall visual effects supervisor Michael Owens chose Scanline based on the studio’s successful water simulations in previous films. Marie and hundreds of other holidayers are caught up in the resulting wave of destruction that sweeps her away and demolishes buildings and other surroundings. Hereafter’s tsunami sequence takes place in the first nine minutes of the film as the central character Marie (Cécile De France) walks through a tropical resort. We take a look at the studio’s digital water live-action destruction effects, digital make-up work and and afterlife visions. Well-known for its CG water creations in films such as 3, Scanline VFX faced new challenges in creating a near-death tsunami experience for Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter.
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