What a difficult road this project was.
This job was won from the strength of another win that was Toyotown: the director was rather pleased with our abilities, and wanted to work with us again. The Toyotown job had been given to me to lead; and I wanted to prove that a good workflow means all the difference to a good-looking product or a bad one. It gave the group an opportunity to prove ourselves successful without the legacy workflow encumbrances we would otherwise have carried.
But it was a disappointment to find out that the team wouldn’t get another go at it: I was asked to revert back to my titular role as ‘cg supervisor’, a euphemism for high-level cg minion, and everyone else knew we would be going back to the same wretched workflow we were trying to change. I don’t know why, but perhaps, now that it had been won, it was status quo ante bellum, and all that.
My contribution was mainly the Realflow water sims and particle effects, the rigging of Gachapin (the character), scene layouts, matchmoving, and pipeline wrangling and custom development.
We had been RND’ing Hybrido sims during pre-production with the (wrong) assumption that the sweet spot for the water sim would be when the character is almost upright. Hybrido did this well, but in the middle of the schedule, we were informed that depicting something coming out of the water in Japan was a no-no (something to do with the population’s sensitivity towards tsunamis, we were told), and the speed of the rising of Gachapin had to be slow, and yet it must depicted as powerful. Thus, we had to throw out weeks’ worth of RND, and ended up fudging and cheating a powerful effect when the character barely rises from the surface. I ended up chucking Hybrido and used a combination of Realwave sims, splash emitters, and Maya’s particles.
The job offered more surprises as conflicting intentions came up surfacing (pun intended). At the last minute, we were asked to come up with a fur solution, scrambled Seekscale to do cloud rendering to help manage the unexpectedly-heavy renders, but still needed to throw back the schedule for a week.
The contributing shot I like best is the water spray shot. It was also the last shot that was approved because it kept on coming back: I couldn’t get it right, for some reason. Then years of experience shouted inside my brain and told me: cheat the shit of it. So I took old water renders, which weren’t even properly tracked to the newest character renders, and put in multiple layers of Trapcode Particular particles, fudged stuff around, and voila: approved!
When I said this job was a difficult road, it was not the work that I was referring to, but the knowledge that I haven’t made a difference. To make a difference lies in constantly making a difference, effecting change; but it becomes impossible if simple opportunities are stunted by the constant retreat to status quo.