For this commercial spot, we needed to create a silky smooth flow of cough syrup that moves thru the air along a specific path, and then breaks apart into an interesting field of droplets, which migrate across screen and then merge into a particle-driven pointillism effect that forms the images of people. Our client was Rhino FX in NYC who did everything else in this spot. The creative on this project was driven by strong graphic images that the client felt strongly about, so it was important to have a highly controllable rig for the fluid simulations. Some of you may have heard of our smorganic technology that keeps cg fluids from breaking up -- well in this project, we used anti-smorganic! Same tool, but this time it was set to drive the fluid apart and to do that in a controllable way. Once the fluid was broken up, we needed to form droplets of specific sizes, keep them as a swarm of individual droplets (ie., don't let droplets re-combine), and migrate them across screen in an attractive way. This was all achieved with a custom force field that eventually got dubbed: the jellybeaner! The force field selected individual core particles within droplets, and then found all the nearby particles and attracted them to the core particle. So each droplet is held together individually by the jellybeaner force. Because the droplets were otherwise free to move about, the push on the mass of the droplet by individual particles being driven toward the core particle generated an amazing, incredibly natural random sort of swarming motion. We could look at these things all day. We combined a few droplet sims together to get as many droplets as the client wanted despite the originating stream being quite small in volume. The droplets were rendered in maya using mental ray, with a simple layered shader of Blinn materials, allowing us more control on refraction and specular. The pointillism effect that forms the images of the people was handled by our colleagues at Rhino FX in NYC, who also deftly handled the design, non-fluid CG, comping and finishing. Artists working on this project at Fusion CI Studios were Mike Wallner , Dan Novy, Mark Stasiuk . And EP at Fusion, Lauren Millar
