Special Effects

Today we listened to a talk about HPC in relation to movie special effects. It was all about how they need to use powerful supercomputers to model the physics that make particles in explosions or waves move realistically. It was very interesting, as the speaker mentioned that the effects for things such as liquids are not exactly life-like, and they are instead more gluggy than actual water. For truly realistic liquid effects, they tried modelling a real 3D plume of ink as it moved through water and then generated it in a simulation with Titan, the supercomputer. The result was almost identical, except that when it was played in an animation, the smoke cloud was separated into single pictures. The computer tried connecting the pictures, but as the smoke cloud had no easily identifiable points of reference the end result consisted of smoke that flickered and twisted, attempting to join the wrong parts of the 3D images with each other. The speaker concluded that until there is a technology similar to CGI used for actors that can be utilised to perfectly replicate water and the way it moves, finding a way to properly simulate realistic 'light' water will be very difficult, even with supercomputers.