Water Fluid FX Simulation | Ghost Ship Crashing Wave

A large-scale water fluid fx simulation represents the powerful energy of an ocean wave crashing into an abandoned ship. Ship's name is Carola from Scottish Maritime Museum, it is a digital scan model. Link: https://www.scottishmaritimemuseum.org/3d_collections/sy-carola/

The FX is a part of applying Houdini large scale flip fluid simulation, pursuit the look where wave crashing and create a ton of spray and fine spray, mist over the air, there are buoyancy mist and also the clump of spray. In order better present a ship, the dense of fine spray is reduced to ease visual.

Technical information:

Building on a $Windows machine to create fine density control addition into underwater bubbles, and foam. The spray is creating from multiple custom methods over the original total of 200 mil particles. Art direction also addresses where fat foam to create a more thin fluid look.

Render in HTOA Arnold, with direct sun look but still keep the original reference look so water geometry mesh behaves as thick and dark, present underwater sands, mud but not reveal underwater bubble blue ocean shore like deep sea.

It took a while to develop, many elements were produced and then removed just to make sure the look is nice enough but not so clumsy/messy visual:

- Extra non-simulated texture foam removed

- Extra geometry ocean wave displacement was removed to keep the scale look

- Extra spray explosive by certain time setup removed

- Water dripping over Carola ship surface

- Rain; Wind simulation

Primary creative effects work comes from skill, art direction, and planning. But still, I want to share my technical configuration:

Data counting:

Render data: 60 Gb

Simulation data: 1.7 Tb

Flip: 17 mil particles

Whitewater: 200 mil particles

Foam: 65 mil voxel

Extra spray: 5 mil particles each phase

Addition foam pattern: 12 mil voxel

Mist & Spray Advect: 15 mil particles

Mist Fine Spray: 9 mil Voxel

Ancient Intel Dual Xeon E5 2696 v2 2.5Ghz + 128Gb Ram computer do this task on Windows 10.

Total time included art & tech: 6 weeks+

Flip visual design about 2 days back and forth for each finer detail

Whitewater took much more time due to multiple research to reveal the best clump, depth: 5 days

Water mesh custom process for best data compress, finer detail and look for the right scale hit hard to schedule, also because the mesh is extreme heavy: 8 days

Spray, mist, and wind drift art direction took about 5 days

Look dev setup: 4 ~ 5 days back and forth with rough compositing to find the best look

Render time hit hard with Arnold since add more reflection of the ship: 7 ~ 10 days

Compositing & Editing: 2 days to create a template for sequences in Nuke, After Effects

And the time that consumes by developing extra fx above then removed, they never see the light of day.