Fabian Nowak breaks down the gravity scene in "Passengers"

My name is Omid from London, beautiful London, here in the United Kingdom. We have an amazing webinar for everybody tonight. This is not an ordinary webinar. I got to tell you, because we got some of the best in some of the multiple worlds and this is just fascinating. What we're going to be talking about here we got amazing panelists and of course we have an award-winning visual effects artist Fabian Nowak, who will actually break down one of the most magnificent scenes of all time the gravity scene of the movie passengers but let me just give you an overview real quick of what to expect today in terms of what we're going to do right after this so we'll be having GridMarkets founders Mark Ross and Hakim Kareem you know walking you through a little bit of an overview on GridMarkets the company and good market submission pipeline then we have our resident Houdini artist Adam Ferestad who will do a quick demo on the submission process for Houdini we also have a an amazing panelist today Anup Ojah from Oracle he is Oracle's global HPC cloud engineering manager and he'll be talking about security which is very important to us and how Oracle security actually works which is what GridMarkets actually uses and then we will jump into the actual part the meat of this webinar which is Fabian breaking down that amazing scene will then you know have a question and answer where you can actually ask any of our other panelists any questions that you may have just remember this is going to be this is being recorded right now and it will be available on GridMarkets webinar website on www.GridMarkets.com webinar so you can actually watch it later don't worry about that now without further ado what I'm going to do is I'm going to invite Mark Ross word markets co-founder to just come to the stage talk a little bit about what grid market is how you got to start it over to you Mark thanks cum I'm one of the founders oops sorry just one second I'm one of the founders of great markets as as almond mentioned and sorry let me get the right slide here okay yeah there we go all right so yes, I'm one of the founders of GridMarkets I'm based in San Francisco and I wanted to give you a quick overview of GridMarkets before we get started so you know who you're talking to and what we're all about some of you already know us but some quick facts we were founded in 2011. our mission at a high level is to democratize creativity and how are we doing that we're focusing on simplifying and accelerating demanding workflows specifically in the media and entertainment area rendering and simulations we also you may or may not know have another business which is focused on the pharmaceutical side where we likewise help to simplify and accelerate molecular simulations for the drug discovery process on the media side we have over four thousand customers they're large studios in some cases all the way down to students so we have a big range of people and studios and customer types that we cater to and they reside in over 90 different countries so at any moment in time GridMarkets is always busy there's always some customer that's you know interested in doing some sort of a rendering or simulation it's important that you should know that our platform was designed and built by artists so there are a number of artists who are part of GridMarkets Adam is one of those there's a number of others some of whom you have met but the platform the workflow the pipeline the features and so on we're all conceived of by the artists who are a part of the team and also by artists who not who are not necessarily a part of the team but who have made suggestions along the way and we have you know tried to be very attentive to those suggestions and to incorporate the those ideas into our roadmap so with that I am going to now give you a little taste of what Fabian is going to do so I wanted to wanted to show you his his clip he's going to go in into this in more detail but this is really what we're showcasing today is this scene which he was very instrumental in creating so let me get that started for you well every time I watch that scene I have to hold my breath it's it's quite an impressive scene and we're gonna as I said hear about that in a few moments with Fabian before we do that a couple quick things on how do you get started with GridMarkets it's very simple you go to GridMarkets.com sign up there's a create account button which you can see here at that webpage once you do that you then download something called envoy which Hakim is going to explain to you in more detail and you can see from the screen here there are three different versions of envoy depending on what operating system you're using once you've download downloaded envoy it comes with plugins for whatever 3d software you are using so you can see we support Houdini Maya cinema 4d nuke 3ds max and blender so depending on which of those software solutions you are interested in using you would install the appropriate plugin once you've done that in this example I'm going to say that you've installed the plugin for Houdini then you use envoy to upload your project files to us we support most of the major renders V-ray Renderman Redshift and Arnold so your submission comes to the GridMarkets cloud it's then beginning to process and the updates regarding that are sent back to a portal which you can see a screenshot of here so for the various jobs that you are working on at any moment in time they will appear in this dashboard again Hakim will go over this in a little more detail but you get the ability to control the jobs see what the status of each of the jobs is through this portal and then as your frames complete they start coming down and are stored in a folder that you have designated at submission time so that's it it's a it's a very simple process Hakim I'm gonna turn it over to you can talk about that in a little more detail and Adam will also be talking about the Houdini pipeline in particular so stopping sharing my screen go over to you Hakim okay thank you very much mark can everyone see my screen yep coming through excellent all right so I'm just going to get into just a bit of the details of what mark just provided the overview of so very quickly as mark mentioned you go to gridlock.com and then you go to that free trial and you can go create an account any of you who are zync users please provide your Zync URL so you're eligible for the discount and do that when you sign up so once you're signed up as mike mentioned you download the version of envoy that you need for your operating system so once that's downloaded please go ahead and let that install once that installs you will see that it actually updates some of its components you can log in then with LinkedIn if you registered that way or you can log in with your email you'll see a page that says please download the relevant plugin and so you go to the plugins page and you will see the list of applications that you have installed locally I'm going to go and install the one for Houdini 18.5 which will allow you then to go and submit from Houdini with that I will hand over to Adam to talk about the Houdini submission go ahead Adam yes so I'm doing a cache in this scene so I'm going to throw in a cloud cache node and I'm going to rename it so that we all know what it does and then I generate the rop and the read nodes from the plugin and put my render flag on the raid node head over to the out context wire in my geometry cache and make everything super neat because we all like a neat scene hit submit render the preflight runs through pulls up I mark which files I want to download to envoy and then I go over the jobs tab to check my credit budget I decided to leave it on no credit budget just to make sure but if I did it kind of alert me if it goes over I can have it terminate the frames or I can have it set to terminate the unstarted frames and just finish what's currently rendering after that I'm ready to go and as you can see the files are getting uploaded securely through envoy you can see in your submissions tab the jobs under that particular submission that you just made and as they progress you will obviously see them going from waiting to running to complete it at any time you can go and click on any of those jobs and see them progressing each of the frames as they get completed you can see the log files we're not going to show them here I just wanted to give you a quick overview and as you see them get completed then you can go to the downloading tab and as those frames actually get created they will get automatically downloaded to you if you selected to do so in the preflight at any time you can go to the files tab you can go and see the actual files that were uploaded and anything that was created that you didn't automatically select to download you can then go manually select and then go download that yourself you can select the number of machines that you want to have running for your jobs my economy is five standards 30 rushes 60 and you can request more as needed we can go up to several hundred if needed you're on the profile page you can select the kind of machines that you want to run by default for the different kind of jobs that you want to run CPU render GPU render and so forth finally I wanted to show you there is an access key here which you can then provide to collaborators and to clients which if you provide that access key under your account they will only be able to see the files for your project so it's a great way to share that data without sharing all the other information about your submissions so this anyway this was a very quick overview I appreciate it was quite right for wanted to get to the main act and if you have any questions please put them in the q a and we'll be happy to answer them at the end so thank you very much and with that I'll turn it back tomorrow thanks zucchini all right just a moment okay so thank you very much so first of all GridMarkets runs on Oracle cloud so that's very interesting so we spoke about files we spoke about computer everything is running in Oracle cloud and what's ultra-cloud is a generation two cloud and by the way my name is anu boza I'm a senior manager for the global HPC team HPC means high performance computing so I lead a team globally and I have almost 15 people worldwide and if you just think about it I believe we have around more than 200 years of experience within my team all we do is every day high performance completely we support customers in the GridMarkets and many more in the cloud so just a safe harbor something I want to give maybe 10 seconds for people to read thank you so this is very interesting so we started the cloud journey maybe three to five years back and we all know we have the competition in the market AWS google cloud they've been there for many years so when we started building this cloud our founder Larry Ellison he told that we want to build a cloud which is different than how the first generation cloud was built so the number one criteria on building the trend to cloud was all about security so security was built inside the cloud it was never after thought process so Larry hired all the smartest guys from everywhere and he told them that give me a gentle cloud but do not make the same mistake that we have made in the gen 1 so that's the genesis of the generation 2 cloud that we call Oracle cloud infrastructure so I'm going to give you a quick you know overview how we differentiate and why companies like GridMarkets will trust gen cloud so when you put all your files all your all the hard work that you have done you want to make sure that that is totally secured with the cloud provider that GridMarkets is running from so historically you know a genuine cloud architecture is something that you see on the screen so what happens is in the genuine cloud there's one big computer so in this case if you look at this this is a machine that has your code that is GridMarkets deploys therefore plus the cloud provider also has their own piece of code because there are two things here one is the customer code and the second is what we call the cloud control computer they both are running inside the same machine so what that essentially means is the cloud provider can see the customer code and the user code can actually access the cloud control so everything's running inside the same machine and they all have access to each other if you look at this this is like security yes I do believe that there are security inside but it was after thought process the basic infrastructure was not built based on security if you go back to gen 2 cloud this is where we coming that's where we started that's what as I mentioned earlier we were asked to build something different that starts with security so what we did was we gave you a compute or a machine to run your code or your piece of software but we took the cloud control panel or computer outside that so if you look at both the diagrams here our security this customer cannot see our data or we cannot see the customer data right they're totally independent the first on the top this is totally belongs to the customer and the one below that belongs to Oracle so this is how we have separated both of them so if you look at this architecture that's a general architecture that's how we can tell you that it's totally secure inside OCI on the quick slide if we look at again gen 2 or gen 1 in this case right the way it was built was it was one big machine it has the networking on the same machine it has the hypervisor on the same machines so everything is built inside the same box but what we have done in the gen 2 is we took the networking outside because there's no business for the networking to be inside the same machine that customer is running so essentially if you run on the left-hand side if you look at it I have a VM but inside the same host behind the cloud provider also has their own networking run so that means that you're not getting the hundred percent CPU utilization whereas in our case in the general cloud we put the net networking behind and then this is what Oracle management maintain you do not pay for it or the customer does not pay for it you only pay for the machine that runs your vms right so that means we give you more performance and we have taken more responsibilities if I go one step further this also helps in security if you look at this architecture now what you're seeing right now on the left hand side is if one of the VM gets compromised it's very easily the other machines will get compromised because the networking are inside the same host right so if you look at this red drone everything gets compromised so that means there's more risk so that's how we build the gen 2 we really thought about this what was the gap in the genuine cloud so in the gen cloud now if you look at it if a VM guest compromise is not going to propagate to the next machine or to the next post so that's all I want to talk about the cloud and the generation to cloud I believe mark and the team has done really good job in trying to understand why the tools already cloud right and I think one of the genesis for them to choosing or the cloud was security first and I heard or I keep on hearing from mark that is very important to him and his customer and this is how we can really guarantee how secure we are and no that's it from my side mark great thank you okay over back to you Omid sure okay now the part that we've all been waiting for look when I first caught up with Fabian back in January with markets at grip markets we do these series called featured artists so if you go to our website if you go to www.GridMarkets.com if you click on community you can you can find featured artists series and you can see amazing artists amazing stories that we tell but back then we were scheduled for a 30-minute talk we ended up talking I guess an hour and a half Fabian and I just I was blown away so folks just get ready you're about to experience some greatness so I'm just gonna hand it over to Fabian go ahead and just tell us how did you do this thing um so yeah just quick word about passengers sorry I'm gonna go through those slides because you already talked about me quite a bit but yeah here's a few movie that I've worked on and we're gonna talk about this one because there is something particular about this one but yeah passenger is a movie that came out in 2017 with Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt directed by the academy awarded martin kingdom and this stream was initially such not such a high budget movie so it was it was actually a pretty low budget movie but it was very ambitious in terms of visual so we had to make tons of different VFX for that movie and effects wise it was covering pretty much the whole spectrum of type of effects so we did some massive plasma thrusters some spinning energy shield to protect the spaceship from material crushing on it at very high speed we created a plasma core reactor that gets out of hand and is about to explode we had to make some fire some smoke vapor lasers glass shattering falling debris falling robots vacuum effects sucking everything around in the tiny holes we even have to make a river and grass or field for some of the final shots we also had to create an entire dying star called a red giant pretty much the same size of our sun I think it was even bigger than our sun with some magnetic field and solar eruption on its surface which needed an insane amount of details and a big up to the one-man army hero responsible for that Javi if you hear me and of course we also had to create an entire sequence with a swimming pool that suddenly goes in 0g turning a peaceful swim in a deadly trap for a Jennifer Lawrence character and this was obviously a key moment in the story it has to be totally hard directed in order to fulfill what the director had in mind and from an ethics point of view it was probably the biggest challenge of that film so yeah I'm just going to replay that clip a very short clip which is actually different clip than what mark showed a bit earlier just resolution there I'm gonna play the loop can you guys still hear me yep you're there yeah sorry I was gone for a second I think my you're back and better than ever Fabian all right well that's cool yeah I don't know what happened I think my computer because my machine is on for weeks and weeks doing calculus and I think maybe the maybe the earthix graphic card was a bit hot and I decided to just shut off the whole screen for a second all good so it's back so yeah as I was saying this was a this was a movie with a challenge at many levels so we had to create something never seen before because as far as I know at that very moment there was some movie with a bit of water of blood oil and whatnot in 0g but it was always tiny amounts like a few droplets but nothing even remotely close to the amount of water in a swimming pool hey Fabian sorry to interrupt just just so you know the right now the screen is frozen on the start of the loop all right all right let me just stop sharing the screen and I'm gonna start again there you go what do you see exactly on the screen right now it for me it just says Fabian Nowak has started sharing his screen share but there's nothing I don't see anything actually okay that does this is great damn sorry well hold on let me do that again do you see anything no no we might need to go to plan b oh hold on looks like your video card may have overheated and stopped doing its that's I was thinking about that actually yes because yeah I got like a black screen for a second and that might explain that oh that would try changing your resolution and changing it back it might reset the streaming protocols oh oh I think I've got an issue there you want I can potentially bring up your slides as a plan b yeah hold on go ahead give it a moment yeah no it's just because I kind of lost everything there for a second oh my god why is it happening just at the worst everything was fine until a few minutes ago I'm really sorry folks I'm gonna try to sort this out but someone has said just like production exactly yeah just like pollution exactly yeah it's like there's always the technical this if the worst can happen if the wars can happen it will happen and then the worst time yes of course always take your time we've got a couple questions maybe we'll just yeah yeah so yeah one question looks like this is probably for you Hakim can you hear me my question is the person is representing a studio they're concerned about security and they would like to know how can they learn more about good markets security architecture and so on right so actually the easiest way is if you go to gridlock.com security you'll see an overview of how you know we've kind of put the system together you'll see that basically we're encrypting everything end-to-end we do follow mpa guidelines on this and so we have you know had actually been audited by some companies on our security model and so we're very confident that we can keep your IP very secure so anyway if you have any more details that you would like to know but first go to gridlock.com security and of course then drop us drop us an email and we'll be happy to answer any more detailed questions great thanks Hakim we have another one this looks like for you Adam can you hear me yep great yeah so the question is coming from a Houdini user they want to be able to do simulations they're wondering whether simulations can be done on the GridMarkets platform oh absolutely as I showed in my demo all you gotta do is throw in a cloud cache node and wire it into your network in the out context and you're basically ready to go it's the most straightforward I as an artist use it all the time I'm yeah almost daily sometimes I'm pushing simulations to the cloud because it gets it off my computer and I don't have to worry about running out of memory I just did a water sim where I was using 180 gigs of memory for doing the surfacing I don't have to worry about tying up my machine so I can still work on other projects or do a game or something while I'm waiting for it to finish it's absolutely sublime to use hey Adam they didn't ask but how big can the simulation machines of GridMarkets get up to in terms of their configuration oh actually I think Hakim might be the better person to answer that one for an exact answer but I have pushed the 300 gigs Hakim can give an answer on how big the actual machine can get to yeah we can get to more than that if if needed so but you know what I think for most of the jobs that we've run you know 300 has been plenty it's a 386 or something I think and so you know if you want more than that then then let us know when we will find higher ram machines for you cool Fabian it looks like you are back we have a couple more questions I can take a few more or we can resume with your presentation up to you I think I had to I had to quit and I restarted zoom actually I think yeah you're you're looking good now so why don't we turn it back over to you go ahead no yeah let's do that and and then we'll go back to the q a after that right yes go ahead okay all right cool so so yeah I was saying multiple challenge show so we had to create something never seen before we had to make all of that with Houdini which most of the artists are mpc back in the days I mean at this time never used myself included so yeah first time opening Houdini which as you may know is a pretty hardcore at the beginning and of course we had to learn it on the fly while at the same time we were trying to deliver some fairly complex shots and yeah so as you know there is nothing as efficient as learning on the battlefield so it's probably for the best and as I said it was quite a limited budget movie so nothing comparable to a big stuff like lion king or avengers for instance but despite being a low-budget movie was as I said very ambitious therefore the delays the delay to deliver everything was relatively tight and we could not afford to have large team of artists however the amount of crazy requests from the director was pretty insane to say the least so for every department involved it was actually quite a challenge in that regard and all the effort was were maximized as much as possible so yeah impossible task new hardcore software to learn at the same time limited time and resources like I think that was the right cocktail yeah pretty challenging show but we do love challenge otherwise we would be doing another job so we start with the Richard research and development of course so we looked at the storyboard in the previous of the 0g sequence and the first thing we thought was how are we going to do that thing what could be the right approach to bring that sequence to life and as usual in order to demystify that we start with a bit of r d so I'm gonna play those video in actually in loop and yeah mute them all there's no need for sound so we had to find some reference in order to know where we were going to where we were going actually before starting the actual dam of the water hopefully thanks YouTube and thanks NASA we found some great footage of astronaut doing a bunch of tests of water with water and zoog in the space station but with very small amount of water of course because they could not you know afford to risk to put some water everywhere in the space station I think it's full of electrical stuff over there and and also some tests in a very low gravity which is the video on the very right on the right side of the screen which is no zero gravity it's low gravity because it's in a parabolic flight but that means they could bring some a bigger amount of water so yeah there was maybe two three liters of water something that maybe a gallons I don't know and those three references that we can watch here where well became basically our main base for pretty much everything from artistic discussion with the director and the VFX supervisor to our own understanding of the laws of physics behind this behavior that looks almost magical so we found out that when the gravity is removed which is the main force driving the water behavior on earth so when you remove the gravity the some other forces which are usually negligible are becoming all of the sudden the main forces in action like the surface tension for instance which tends to make any body of water turn into a sphere and why that well because the spherical shape is the shape where the surface tension is the most evenly distributed there is no corner there is no angle where the tension could peak so yeah it's it's evenly distributed so that yeah that's kind of like the rest shape if you will the perfect shape so yeah if you let some water in the energy long enough and you don't disturb it it will it will eventually turn into a perfect sphere but if you disturb it I mean if you had some external forces like having a momentum for example in effects you would say an initial velocity or if you blow some hair to to make some sort of wind if you poke it with your finger or if you if you throw an object at it to make a collision like a tiny camera like we can see there with a gopro or if you if you splash more water to it or if you inject some hair inside etc. well it will react accordingly so it will make some surface waves it will make some ripple it will make some air bubbles inside that will inherit the motion of the of the swirling fluid inside the inside the bubble of water yet eventually it will try to maintain or to go back to a spirit spherical shape and we've also noticed you could see that just a while ago on the on the left reference the one on the left screen side that the herbivore that could be trapped inside a water bubble will not escape they will stay trapped within that shield made by the surface tension so yeah that gave us a lot of hint for how what we needed to see in that sequence to make it looks sort of realistic if we may say and from there started to do some development and as I al as I always do well that's usually what I do on every on every big show I worked on is that I always start the same way I basically make one massive simulation that sort of covers the entire sequence so I try to cover all the different shots or every aspect of the sequence into one big simulation that allows me to foresee all the potential technical issues that I may encounter later during the production and so I can think already about how to sort them out or how to work around or how to avoid them more simply unfortunately I'm not able to show you that initial r d test I would have loved to but I can't but I can tell you that even if that was not looking super great it was because it was very fairly low resolution it was looking pretty cool and I was also very happy because it was well my first simulation in odb and and so yeah I was doing something pretty crazy for my very first team in Houdini so I was quite happy with that but most important he was giving us straight away pretty much all the answers we were looking for first answer like heavy flip simulation it looks cool but it's gonna be very hard to have a total artistic control if we let the flip simulation run free so we need to find a way to really control it to update it because the director might want to draw manually where it's each droplets on each frame of each shot which is something that actually happened in many shots he was starting to draw oh yeah I won't just drop it there but this one I wanted here and so it was that was pretty crazy the second answer that gave us is that okay is not gonna work for the close-up shots and the underwater shots since they will be included Jennifer Lawrence performance so that the live action plate and we will need to match some tiny portion of the actual plate with cg so we need we will need to make a specific approach for this shot to have an absolute control on where the water surface actually is and a third answer is like once it's simulated at very high resolution that should works pretty nicely for the end of the sequence when the gravity is coming back but we might face some volume loss issue in the center of the swimming pool which I have noticed on my initial tests and we are going to have to find a solution for that so let's start to make the sequence so the whole sequence could be divided in three distinct parts and for each of these parts we'll have a different type of water effects to create we had wide shots we had close-up shots we had inside the water etc. and on set they built this underwater rig that could move Jennifer Lawrence up and down within it that could also give her the ability to stop floating so to control the buoyancy if you will and that allowed the director and the VFX supervisor on set to shoot all the plates of Jennifer Lawrence that we needed to create only the fixed shot that would become the whole sequence and we could use these plate to place her in any position facing any direction we wanted depending of the shot but of course it was not always working as planned they would have been too easy and quickly we realized that for some of the shots we're gonna have to replace her entirely by a cg double so the bright side of that is that is that it gives us much more freedom especially for the wide shot so the first part the first part of the sequence the first part is when the gravity the artificial gravity goes off suddenly while Jennifer is swimming it hard to feel natural even if it's something we never seen it had to be gracious and yet at the same time it had to be scary like a sort of water monster coming to life so we had to keep the main character trapped inside a massive blob of water and we had to keep her in the center of the frame or in very specific part of the frame and at the same time we need needed to see some thinner splashes and bubbles of water moving all around the room and at some point well the character managed to escape she takes a panic deep breath and then she she's hit by a wave that is splashing back against one of the corner of the pool trapping her for good in a much bigger blob of water so I think for the two first shot of the sequence so this one the zg70 and the one just after the zg80 so not this one sorry but the two white shots so this one yeah for those two first shot I think I did something around 250 version of the of the simulation for each of these shots and and yeah that was well drivers nuts at some point but there were there was also the front part so we had to come with sorry we had to come with a with a hybrid approach where the animation department was making a blocking for each shot with rough shape in Maya they actually used an otl that we made for them via the Houdini engine and in order to convert those rough sphere into some sort of like metabolism if you will but yeah using another I was basically converting everything into vdb and back to mesh so they could present something that was looking somehow close to what we are going to do in FX and then once those spell blasts from animation were approved we were getting back this rough shapes into engineer and I used them to sort of drive the FX simulation so the first part of that sequence was mostly heavy flip simulation using a control a custom control tool that we created to out direct the water shapes and a movement at simulation time in a nutshell we were using the animation to create a sort of massive velocity field that then we used to advect the flip simulation within a certain threshold so more inside the water less on the on the border more not at all outside or that was the other we had we went through quite a lot iteration back and forth in order to get the right control on that on that stuff and and yeah we also had to walk around the gas surface tension from Houdini which at that time was not working very fine very well I think we were using Houdini 15 or we didn't need 16 I forgot but it was before the kind of revisit the whole flip system and white water so yeah this at this time the gas of extension was actually kind of working until a certain point and then it was starting to create some crazy turbulent noise on the surface which was the total opposite of what we wanted to see because we wanted to keep the surface very smooth so it was yeah that and the overall control was really the actual battle for us in FX so we did a lot and a lot of iteration until everyone was finally happy and what I see a lot of iteration is that is a I really mean a lot with a lot of changes here you can see for example on the top left corner the zg136 shot on top left corner is the is the version that came out for the trailer for the first trailer and then a month later or two months later the final version in the movie which is on the bottom right corner and so as you can see it's the same shot but it really looks massively different personally I prefer the I really prefer the trailer version visually but well first it's a matter of personal opinion but also it's as a shot on its whole I prefer it but it had to work it has to work in a within the sequence so in terms of storytelling of evolution during the sequence of continuity between shots the final version made actually much more sense you can also notice on those two screenshots that the selling of the room has dropped it drastically changed between the two version I think the environment artists work on that created hundreds version of that selling I think he was really going crazy at the end he could not was just selling anymore I did too many versions of that I think I'm not lying but I think it was something around 570 version of the setting or something completely crazy like that so the second part of the sequence is so I'm going to play that on the back the second part of the sequence so after the after the beginning the whole waters start to gently settle making very large bubbles of water that are wobbling and smaller ones and even smaller ones and smaller ones done to the very same droplets dancing all around the room everything is moving slower and slower along the shots but at the same time Jennifer's character is fighting more and more trying to escape to reach to reach to get some hair and and yeah she's getting really stuck into something that looks more and more like a deadly trap and yeah she's trying to reach the surface wherever the direction of that is which is pretty crazy when you think about it it's like the surface is not up it might be down it's like yeah it makes no sense but it's actually the way it works in space and so the tension is building the music is getting more and more dramatic up to the point that the character lost losses sorry consciousness and and suddenly everything is so quiet and it becomes almost like an embryonic shot this this one with the star visible on the background through the window and we sort of reached that moment of strange grace almost like a sweet death and so that second part from from a simulation point of view was mostly underwater bubbles so inside the water like the air bubbles really that's the pretty much the only thing we really simulated which was fairly easy actually it was some very using some kernels and the cg doubles velocity to generate some velocity field that could affect a very simple particle system and then instancing some sphere on top of that to make some air bubble but there was no real big flip simulation only the small one you know to get some small splashes there and there on the side of the room and so we made most of that parts of the sequence with a massive deforming geometry fairly easy to control actually very easy to control and that gives us the 100 heart control that we were looking for so we could match exactly where the plate was to where the plate was to make the water surface match it exactly like for example on that shot where she got the ends out of the water here if I press pause for a second so the end and her inside the water it's actually it's obviously it's an actual plate but around there is an invisible blend and all the rest is full cg and then she's a key so we can you know rotate out and had some the air bubbles and add the cg environment beyond and everything and so for that kind of stuff we really need to have the full control on it and so yeah this could be mixed also with some ripples so as you can see here I've run a few ripple simulations just to get ripples around the intersection with the hand you know traveling across the water and fading out and that shot for example this one inside the water this one is full cg there are no end or nothing because we decided to add this shot like very lately in the production he was not playing in the initial previews I think so yeah and it was mostly a trick at render time so we had to cheat the index of refraction of the water the ior which normally is 1.33 of the real water and then we went to something like 1.5 or even higher so which is more something like glass so it's less refractive it's deforming less the idea was to yeah to get the water more clear less deforming less refracting so we could see perfectly here Jennifer Lawrence's face when she was in the water and the camera was outside oh and we could also see the environment through the water surface behind her when the camera was inside the water so yeah let me show you quickly a very simple approach of how you could do that if you want to do it at home so you make a simple sphere you give it enough subdivision so you get something fairly high res and then you just start to add some mountain deformer on it for to make it very simple and then if you animate the time with like a simple expression like dollar 25 or whatever I think that's what I put there then you get already you know like very simple wobbling shape then you smooth it then you start some other noise on top of it with smaller and smaller scale to get the thinner details and you end up with something that might look roughly like a like a water bubbles you could do the same with using attribute verb and stacking some noise and flow noise and animate them and yeah having the same sort of present or you could you know use that same sphere with less division to to get a normal and upward vectors and then you can use a simple seen spectrum to get a spectrum running on top of the surface then depending on how you are setting your spectrum you're going to get obviously different results but that's going to give you very quickly some yeah something that looks like you're like you are what we were looking for so we did a bunch of iteration then you just here for just the example give it normal material just to get something blue and a reflective then I put like a transform to give it an animation to make it move sideways and then yeah with two simple key I just be sure that the key are linear so we don't have like an acceleration and a slowdown but something linear and then you make a play blast out of it and that gives you here you go like a big sphere of zero g water sort of floating in the air and then if you want to make like an actual passenger shot you're going to need more than that you're going to need all the background as well so let's say you make a big box you fill it with points use a point from volume if you want to make it simple give them a random p scale random normal then you make an animated noise that is based on time so we get each pt num moving and getting multiplied over time so they are you know moving less and less so let's watch this yeah I need to display the points a bit bigger sorry here we go so you can see the points are moving and then yeah a few lines of of x just to make them rotate each of points make them rotate over time and then copy to point the sphere that we created just before and know that they all have different rotation and a p scale then you add the arrow bubbles with your character inside on the foregone and playblast that make a flip book and boom you get pretty much an avenger sorry a passenger shot and then you're gonna have to make the air bubbles inside so as I say I'm not gonna do that but it's a fairly easy particular system with a bit of noise hey Fabian just want to give you a quick notice time check five minutes until we can go yeah yeah well that that's that's well we are on the end so the last part of the sequence so when the artificial gravity is coming back the whole bodies of water spawning in the air suddenly crashes back to the ground and in the pool as well as Jennifer's character and then she wakes up and managed to swim back to the platform back to safety and and and end of the sequence so this was initially due to be a mix of VFX and an actual plate so they shoot they shoot on set you see they recreated the whole swimming pool and they put this big water tank on top on the on the on the top of it let me show you their breakdown so with a stunt woman sitting in a water tank and they let it fall in the water but of course it was just unusable as it is so we replaced everything in full cg which was much more simple and easy to control so for that part I was back to heavy flip simulation plus custom white water solver to make the foam and spray again because yeah hoodie 16 or before 16.5 so the white water solver was not that great at this time so we decided to go for a custom version of it and so yeah with a mixed of of flip simulation and and a pop particle simulation for the white water and a bit of rigid bodies for the all the furniture you know the chair the table the lights the lamps falling back in into the on the ground and some of them into the swimming pool so for that what I've done is that I made like a first flip simulation let's say mid resolution that I used just as a velocity field to advect a rigid body simulation so they looks like they were pushed by the water and then once I got the rigid body simulation I could use that as a collision dynamic collision for the actual high resolution flip simulation of the water which are even ribbon on top of everything so you could make some splashes you know around the chair around the furniture and everything and it was looking like everything was actually walking as a whole and and yeah as I mentioned before I had some volume loss earlier that I noticed on the r d which is no at this time I had no idea how to fix it properly no I would know how to do it but at this time I had no idea where the where those particles were disappearing because you should get the same amount of water back into the swimming pool but eventually the whole pool was like sinking like I like if I had a hole in the bottom of the pool which I had not and so I did not understand where it was coming from so I tried to fix it but didn't manage to so I just walk around it and I actually hide in a meter of water that was not visible from the camera angle but I was emitting a bunch of water at the on the first frame so I could kind of compensate the water I was losing with the volume loss and so yeah that was pretty dirty fix but you know you have a problem you don't know how to fix it but you have to keep moving forward so there is a there is no bad solution if that fixes your problem there then it's a good solution and you will have time later to think about how to fix that the proper way the smart way if you want then since we were selected for the academy awards and the vas I got the chance to make some flying cameras and break down through the shots to get the cool stuff that we are able to put in the technical breakdown and that's what we are looking here so yeah a lot of fun that was sort of yeah like a reward for me after the whole battles of the drg sequence and and let's have a look at the final sequence completed so I'm going to show you all the cuts all the shots sorry but uncut in full resolution so when I say uncut it's because all the shots have the handles so they are not trimmed as they are in the final cut so for those who are not working in visual effects the when we are working visual effects we are actually working with what we call a full frame range and then and then there is the catch wrench which is usually something around 10 frames at the head of the shot and 10 frame at the back of the shot at the end of the shot that are used just to give some flexibility to the editor so he could it can shift forward or backward a tiny bit each shot and so yeah usually as an artist it happens very often that sometimes you make something that looks super cool that you're really proud of and unfortunately it's actually in the handles so nobody will ever see it in the cinema only you and your colleagues knows that that is that it's here and the cool thing is that the VFX studio when they give you all the shots for making your showreel they give you the actual full frames of each shot so that's pretty cool so that's what you are watching here and and I just put some little fade to black where there was some other parts happening somewhere else in the spaceship just to stay on the underwater stuff so there you go you got everything there and and that's it I think I've reached the end of my presentation awesome cool so yeah thank you everyone and I hope you I hope you found that little talk interesting oh no not interesting fascinating stuff come on well thank you very much I'll tell you this but this was this is amazing stuff so we got a bunch of questions but before we get there there's this question that I got I got to ask you so this this was pretty complicated stuff right and now we are living in a world where you got remote set you got to be able to to deliver in a remote only environment is this something that that we can actually do these days with this complexity oh yeah definitely yeah yeah yeah you can I mean yeah the complexity has nothing to do with working in remote as long as you are you know well organized and the communication goes well between between each person involved that that's gonna be a that's gonna be fairly easy right now for example I'm I'm working on some fairly complex shots that involves pretty much all the disciplines so we have concept artists animators modeler lighters are doing some heavy effects and and we are all walking from different place we are all dispatched all around Europe I'm in France there is all the computers are in UK's almost most of them are in UK we have some people in eastern Europe in the South of France North of France wherever so yeah that's not that's no problem we are all connected all day long via large google meet so it's a bit like if we were all working in the in the same floor in an open space office so we can share our screen or at any time we can we can show what we are doing we can ask any question if we have any problem or yeah and it feels you know it gives a bit of social if I may say so because we are all you know like talking or mumbling or swearing sometime when something is not working so yeah we really feel like we are all on the same floor it's pretty cool and and yeah actually doing the same with with some students all the students in my school they are all working you know on their graduation movie or preparing that radiation movie for for next year and and the same thing they are all locked down so everyone is at home in a different part of Paris or sometime even in France and and here they are all you know on the same discord channel so they are all chatting together and sharing stuff and as long as you have like a sort of massive google drive where everyone can put stuff and grab stuff then it's I mean it's just a matter of communication and an organization yeah that's definitely doable awesome the next question is Thiago is asking did you use multi-solver with rigid body and flip in same dopp network so sorry can you say that again yeah he's writing I think you should be able to see it but did you use multi-solver with rigid body no no no no no no you know sorry I didn't read the question oh yeah for the furniture stuff at the end no yeah I think we could go that way but that would makes everything like very heavy and and slow and also you would have a lot of issue you know really controlling the the rigid body themselves because well for people who already tried that you need to you know to tweak the density of each rigid body so they are more less than so they're gonna float or sink more and if you know if you have like many different objects with different type of materials or shapes or size it's going to be a nightmare to make everything like working properly plus it's going to actually really slow down the whole simulation and the rich body and the flip simulation and yeah in the end you're not going to get any I mean the way I've done it is it's fairly easy and it gives you like full control on everything you have full control on the flip then you make the rigid bodies you get them moved by the water so they really looks like they're actually moving with the water and then if you want that particular object you need to stop here you can do it without you know affecting the rest of the simulation and then you rerun another sim on top of that to get splashes and collisions against the rigid body object and in the end you just merge everything together around everything together you'll never see the difference and that's much more easy to control I mean that gives you a yeah much more artistic control on top of on that and also yeah that makes I think that optimized the simulation time quite a lot I hope that's your question I think Thiago is pleased with that there's a couple more questions I think one for great markets it probably should go to Adam hag is asking does it work with pd does GridMarkets work with pdg as well currently we do not have pdg support though it is something we are definitely investigating and hopefully we have official support soon it's yeah it there's a lot of cogs and wheels we need to get working for it to all come together right and we don't want to produce a subpar product obviously so we're it is being worked on it is something that is being investigated and yeah so hopefully very soon Karen is asking a couple questions one should I think go to to Hakim does grid market support three delight renderer so we don't support 3d light as yet it is something that we've had a couple of inquiries about so if you actually go to goodmarket.com versions you'll see the list of applications and renderers that we currently support but we are adding to that we should be adding corona for example soon but also 3d light is something that people have been asking for so currently if you have a project that there's something that you know you need soon then please let us know and we'll be looking to support you know many other renderers and and other applications such as katana in the near future here's another one which is my question as well for Fabian how much time you took to make this entire sequence and those 500 variations I don't know exactly how much time but it was it was months I think it was I don't want to say to say to say to say anything wrong but yeah it was it was definitely a couple of months and it's too bad because I used to have all the numbers the actual numbers but I know that and also you know in terms of this space we went you know I think there was something around 1.5 petabytes of data in total for the whole show something pretty crazy so that's definitely not something you can do alone at home if that's your question Karen but that's definitely something you can do with the help of a render farm definitely how many ethics artists were we are working with you on this shot so we I started with my friend javi that I think is here somewhere in the comments I think I saw him commenting so yeah we started pretty much two artists and eventually we end up let me see just second maybe six artists in in total at the at the peak who were actually covering you know all the the shots with Jennifer Lawrence in the bubble when the camera was pretty close to her but the big heavy flip simulation shots were done by me and and by Javi so we split them I did the two big first one when the gravity goes off and the swimming pool starts to rise and then the second shot and then we have a little cut and then there is this other shot the one that I show you the zga 136 with the different version from the trailer and the final that was done by Javi and the other one when the big bubbles splash in the in the big one was also done by Javi but we were using you know Javi was using some caches of my first shot to place them in the background so to get you know some big stuff and we are just retiming them so they looks like they were going slower so they didn't look like the like the actual cash from the first shot there was a lot of tricks you know and cheating everywhere but yeah for all the once we are good with the setup for the older inside shot and the and the outside shot the close-up we could dispatch those shots to to a junior artist who are actually you know kind of just running the setup we are giving to them and and yeah that was it was pretty crazy because at first at first I thought we were going to go to be able to do everything just me and Javi or chevy and me I should say and and eventually you know the production start to go crazy there is more retake on some other sequence more stuff to do suddenly new shots coming and yeah and the delay is not pushed back so we still have to deliver everything at the same date so at some point yeah we started the show we were like a very few artists on the whole show I think we were maybe three or four and we ended up maybe at the peak of the production we might have been like 12 fix artists in FX just maybe for a couple of weeks but there was just you know in order to get done a bunch of shots so yeah there was a that was pretty crazy awesome stuff look we got we got more questions but we just can't answer them at this point we apologize for not getting to all your questions but don't worry about it just send us your questions again to support GridMarkets.com and then we'll be answering them for you just one more reminder this whole session was recorded it will be available on GridMarkets.com and you can go to GridMarkets.com webinars and we have another one coming up on May 19th with with our my artist Ryan O’Phelan so you don't want to miss that one too just go to GridMarkets.com webinars and go ahead and you know try to join that as well just there's one bit of reminder here that Zync users will actually get a 20 off for the first month but I got to ask real quick mark how does that work for Zync users thanks almond very easily go to the home page there's a button there it says looking for a Zync render farm alternative click the button and there will be a page that's specific for Zync users which will give a feature comParison and there will be a sign up place and on the sign up form there is a place where you can put your Zync URL in which will then qualify you for that discount beautiful and folks remember you can go to the website and you can use the promo code 2021 may 12 webinar and get 50 free credits go ahead and do that you don't want to miss this you want to try the beautiful environment GridMarkets can provide for you look I wish we had another hour because there's just so many questions I didn't get when I was talking to Fabian back in January I still have a lot of questions I know a lot of folks also do but hey this is all the time we had today thank you very much for participating thank you very much Fabian for sharing that was awesome fantastic with us hopefully we will see everybody in our may 19th webinar the second the series please go ahead like I said to the website and register for that too with that have a beautiful day everyone see you soon guys thanks Fabian thank you thank you all thank you all thanks for joining.