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MillimeterUndersea Achievements
Oct 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
DreamWorks Animation was well into preproduction for Shark Tale long before anyone on the team saw Pixar/Disney's Finding Nemo. DreamWorks, therefore, came up with its own technical solutions for many of the same problems solved by Pixar for Nemo, as well as handling dozens of other issues unique to Shark Tale, which has a more cartoony, Tex Avery-style than its underwater predecessor.
The foam for the Whale Wash in Shark Tale was created in a PDI-proprietary fluid simulation program, but then dissipates in the water as a milky mist rendered in Maya.
In particular, Doug Cooper, the film's visual effects supervisor, explains that Shark Tale required filmmakers to grapple with delicate lighting issues, as well as finding creative ways to animate kelp and other undersea vegetation, bubbles, and the “Whale Wash,” a car wash-like setup for whales. Unlike most major studio CG movies, these solutions were found using various combinations of off-the-shelf software, rather than writing tools from scratch.
This alone makes the film unique from a major studio perspective, according to Cooper. “We animated and modeled everything in Maya, rendered in Mental Ray and RenderMan, and did the effects work in Maya,” he says. (For S.D. Katz's review of Maya 6 see p. 49). “There were some proprietary tools created, but unlike our Shrek movies [made at sister subsidiary PDI] and Pixar movies, most of this was accomplished using existing third-party applications as the primary authoring tools. It illustrates that you can make major films at the studio level using off-shelf tools, with a little of your own special sauce mixed in.”
Cooper cites the organic kelp as a typical example. Rather than building a tool from scratch, effects developer Scott Cegielski tweaked Maya's Paint Effects module to export data outside of Maya.
“He found a back door in the system to dump data out and render it through RenderMan, which is not how Maya Paint Effects usually works,” Cooper explains. “Maya usually renders data for plant and foliage systems using its own splat-based renderer. Lighting and integrating these elements with our elements, coming from RenderMan, would have been difficult. But Scott found a way to take that paint-stroke information out of Maya and put it into RenderMan, where it was rendered as hair primitives. Because it needed to be thick, in the case of the kelp leaves, he applied textures and displacements to give the hair primitives true volume. That permitted us to render a massive amount of kelp, foliage, and flowers more efficiently.”
Similarly, the production used Maya to build unique bubble trails, and combined proprietary tools with Maya for the core of the Whale Wash foam that slides off the body of a whale as it dives underwater.
“One of the biggest cheats we did with the physics was in terms of the Whale Wash,” says Cooper. “The foam itself was done with a proprietary fluid simulation that we got from PDI and behaves like foam does in air. But as the foam is scrubbed off the whale, it becomes Maya particles as it dissipates into the water as a milky mist. This combination was great because it achieved our goal of making it look realistic, and yet adhering to a very specific cartoon world we created underwater.”
Cooper adds that DreamWorks' recent conversion to Linux-based HP hardware paid off by improving the production's rendering efficiency, as the studio added several hundred render boxes with new AMD Athlon processors late in production. Shark Tale was the first CG feature made entirely at DreamWorks' animation facility since that conversion was completed, and in fact, was the first CG feature produced entirely in the Los Angeles area.
