TVC - Pool Splash

[davemcd]

Hi Everyone. We recently finished a TVC that used phoenix FD for a stunt replacement shot where a boy had to fall into a pool hitting his head on the way..

You can check it out on the production companies site here:

http://www.thepenguinempire.com/work-item/?id=55

The CG shot is the 4th shot in. The whole pool surface was replaced with phoenix fluids, We animated a CG body double for simulation and refraction only (the boy is footage shot on green screen the whole time above the water). The boogie board was cg and animated prior to simulation so it drives the water splash etc.

There were a few challenges all up in using phoenix FD for a production shot that required several workarounds. Mainly to do with settling the liquid and having predictable results as we increased resolution. We didn't have much success with brush mode prefilling a predefined pool shape (the volume would just change so crazily especially as the resolution increased, and our pool level needed to be spot on to match other elements) so we resorted to initial fill up of the grid area and only minimal collision surfaces, for example the pool top edge and a cut down piece of pool wall for the splashes to bounce off (only the area immediately around the boy)

We tended to find that static meshes that are there at similation start seem to create an air pressure effect that pushes the water surface down even if they are a decent distance from the mesh. Our only way around this was to let it be and have a decent amount of frames of simulation settling time before the shot starts ( from memory it was only about 100 frames)

We also animated the foam and splash thresholds to be very low at the start to avoid unwanted collision foaming around the edges then turn up just before the impact of the splash.

It did feel fairly unpredictable working with phoenix FD until we got a stable-ish setup and stayed at a resolution that seemed to work, early on was quite frustrating but in the end we're fairly happy with the result and the clients were very happy.

Cheers

Dave

edit* here's a breakdown edit we've just done

https://vimeo.com/105103291

[Ivaylo Katev]

at which second is the cg shot, is it at 11 sec?
the starting scene looks too realistic to be cg.
anyway, i'm glad to see the result, it's very realistic. however, if you have problems do not hesitate to tell us, we are always ready to help not only with advices, but also with changing code and preparing special builds. for the ender's game we did multiple core adjustments in the simulation and rendering in order to avoid problems. sometimes with small code improvement you can avoid huge extra work of the 3d artists.

[Paul Oblomov]

Look quite good But, without true motion blur, right ?

[TSR_trix]

Wow, excellent work!
In first time watching, its very hard to see where the sim part was. After a few more times, I would prefer a bit higher splashes, but thats a nihilism.

[kimgar]

oh my, what an amazing commmercial, having kids the same age, this hit me really hard.

fantastic piece of work, i could not tell what was phoenix and what was not, congrats!

no naiad in max? no worries

[stevesideas]

Amazing ad. You can't even see the CGI. Very well done. Very moving too !

[davemcd]

hey everyone

Sorry I didn't reply sooner, i wasnt getting notifactions to replies in the thread, need to change my prefrences.

Ivaylo; the waters CG for that entire shot, however over the whole shot the refraction pass is blended with the real water from the plate as it had some nice shadows and volume to it. On future jobs we'll ask more questions when we have issue. This was only the second time we'd used it in production so were still finding our feet. plus it was such a fast turnaround job we needed to find ways to push forward no matter what.

Paul: it was rendered with Vray motion blur on could've done with more samples in the foam though as they're a little dotty. defocus was in post though (not using depth pass though as zdepth doesnt have correct foam and splashes, they come out white)

Thanks everyone else for your comments. I'll see about uploading our early tests plus the raw render (you can see what dodginess we managed to get away with in the comp ). We'll do a breakdown eventually but we're typically really late in doing those.

Cheers

Dave

[kimgar]

coool, would love to see more shots from this thing

[davemcd]

Gathered together a couple of quick bits and pieces to show some of the work.

This was our pre-pro test to see if Phoenix FD would do the splash the way we wanted. Its out of focus as the end shot would be out of focus and I didnt want the client to critique details that would never read in the final piece
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feg8...ature=youtu.be

Here's the final CG setup and render. There were some other passes that matted out all the garbage you see around the edges. You can also see that some of the foam sim has some weirdness as it travels towards camera but it was always going to be behind the actor in the final comp so it was never an issue. The bits you could see looked fine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Itib...yer_detailpage

And here's some before and after images etc

[Ivaylo Katev]

very good sim and rendering, i think there is some kind of vertical movement of the foam, it may be wrong motion blur, not sure what is it.

[davemcd]

We were thinking that the splashes threshold was causing splashes to form on the little wave heading towards the view (basically throwing upwards and forwards) because it was never seen behind the actor we never looked at tweaking it too much. If was to be seen were going to animate the splas threshold down once the main splash had happened.

Should'nt be wrong motion blur at all as its all in camera inside vray.

Cheers

Dave

[MANUEL_MOUSIOL]

very nice work! I love how the board and the water have this realistic fast abrupt motion.
thanks for sharing some of the process too!

[davemcd]

Hey Everyone

We got around to making a proper breakdown of the shot which you can check out here:

https://vimeo.com/105103291

I'll edit my top post as well to include the link. Enjoy.

Dave

[Ivaylo Katev]

thanks for sharing!

[squintnic]

looks really good!