Conjuring up gooey blood-like fluid dripping and splashing off a stunningly-cool dragon, melting Rooney Mara's head into an oozing mass and ripping Daniel Craig's head apart in a violent blood spatter are the rare opportunities that every fluid fx artist dreams of. So when Blur Studio asked for Fusion's cg fluids expertise in David Fincher's ground-breaking title sequence for The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, there was no shortage of 'whoops' from the team. When one of Fusion's artists got assigned the shot where Blomqvist's head gets ripped to pieces, his response said it all: "You mean I get to crush James Bond's head? Right oooon!"
Of course the usual pre-project excitement was quickly followed by the sobering reality of actually having to execute creative director, Tim Miller's unprecedented vision — the fluid sims had to work with Blur's meticulously beautiful, but violently-moving character animation, so the fluids had to be tightly controlled while maintaining a natural behavior, and just about all the shots were extreme close-ups — the "ECU" being the typical nightmare scenario when it comes to cg fluids. And of course there were the usual sort of technical challenges, which really turn Fusion VFX Supervisor, Mark Stasiuk's crank.... in a good way. The fluid elements would be created with RealFlow, as it provides a stable, high-speed fluid solver that allows the user to integrate custom controls and outputs data in a format that is so standardized that virtually any vfx studio's pipeline can take in without batting an eyelash. Even so, Mark would have to develop custom behavior technology to make the fluids look & behave the way Miller and David Fincher envisioned.... Read the full case study of Fusion's involvement here: lavalamp.fusioncis.com/