Part 2

For Frantic, there were a number of advantages to this pipeline. Static components such as crow’s nests and masts were modeled and textured with a few variations that the particle system would choose from and then add scale variation in x, y and z during assembly, so no two components were the exact same shape. This gave the artists a lot of variation in each boat while keeping with the general design. This system also allowed for the combining of both animated and static components on each boat and have them react to each other. For example, Thinking Particles would vary the rocking of the boats, which would affect the swaying of the beam and sail while keeping them attached to the mast. Using a particle system made it easy to randomize and control the large number of objects.

In addition, the entire CG sequence of 2,500 boats was populated with soldiers — roughly 70,000 in all — who needed to be seen performing on the ship. The scene also featured fire and smoke elements, CG explosions and boat damage from impact.

“The fact that we had eight weeks to do the whole job was quite a challenge,” said Crosby. “Furthermore, our scenes consisted of hundreds of millions of polygons of geometry. With so many elements shadowing, reflecting and overlapping each other, it made breaking the renders down into smaller chunks difficult. Using conventional instanced geometry wasn’t a good option because we wanted each boat and crew to look somewhat unique. Cebas Final Render allowed us to vary scale, speed, start frames, textures and other things on instanced geometry. Thinking Particles was used to semi-randomly pick from these instances to build each unique boat. This allowed us to render everything except the water in single passes without exceeding the RAM limit, which saved tremendous amount of time and allowed us to assemble and update scenes very quickly.”




Massive Pipeline

Frantic also created a Massive pipeline specifically for the film. The artists were able to integrate and utilize the AI-driven crowd simulation software in a unique way that speeded up the production process without sacrificing quality. For the characters, Frantic had about five weeks to set up a Massive pipeline and get the 70,000 soldiers animated over 2,500 boats. To do this, the team used Massive to animate various boat crews. Thinking Particles was then used to modify each crew’s animation and then propagate these crews throughout the fleet.

At the heart of this unique methodology was Frantic’s approach. Frantic used Massive to generate thousands of frames of the virtual performers doing what it needed them to do, and used Thinking Particles to randomly propagate them onto the boats — grabbing random frames and positions and so forth. Massive became the engine for animation, while Thinking Particles was the distribution.




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