“The Day After Tomorrow” by Emmerich
Conference:
- SIGGRAPH 2004 More animation videos from SIGGRAPH 2004:
Title:
- The Day After Tomorrow
Length:
- 2:30
Director(s):
Company / Institution / Agency:
- Digital Domain, Inc.
Description:
To create the destruction of Los Angeles by powerful twisters, Digital Domain created a system where twisters could be pieced together by toggling and modifying a selection of tornado components. This twister toolkit could mix and match between groupings of volumetric pieces that were then employed to make each twister unique. To destroy the City of New York with the biggest storm surge to ever hit land, we created an almost entirely synthetic city including CG buildings, cars, crowds, and, of course, the CG storm surge that floods the city, picking up buses and interacting with structures and people.
Hardware:
HARDWARE: PC Intel dual P4 2.4 GHz CPU, 2 GB RAM.
Software:
SOFTWARE DEVELOPER: Modeling: Houdini 5.5, Maya 5. Animation: Maya for character animation, Houdini for FX animation, Motion Builder for editing motion capture. Rendering: Houdini Mantra 5.5, RenderMan 10. Dynamics: In-house particle tools working within Houdini, in-house Fluid Simulation tool using Houdini as a front end. Compositing: In-house software Nuke 4. Additional software: In-house software TRACK. Custom software: VoxelB volumetric rendering, Nuke, fluid simulation tools, TRACK tracking, Maya-to-Houdini and Houdini-to-Maya custom scene translations. OS: Red Hat Linux 7.2, Windows 2000 SP 2, Irix 6.5 (for Discreet products).
Additional Contributors:
Producer: Mark Gordon
Visual Effects Supervisor: Karen Goulekas
Visual Effects Supervisor: Matthew Butler
Visual Effects Producers: Todd Isroelit, Julian Levi
Digital Effects Supervisor: Bryan Grill
Computer Graphics Supervisors: Sean Andrew Faden, David Prescott, Andy McGrath Waisler
Compositing Supervisor: Eric Bruneau
Digital Producer: Andra Bard
CG Effects Animation Leads: Robert Andrew David Frick, Jonah Hall, Jason Iversen, Joe Jackman
CG Effects Animators: Mir Zafar Ali, Charles Anderson, Jim Berberov, Steve Blakey, Joseph Cavanaugh, C.M. Chapman, Hammer Chu Wai Ho, Brandon Davis, Todd Dufour, Michael Edland, Kent Estep, Rocco Florimonte, Ashraf Ghoniem, Cody Harrington, Garman Herigstad, Marc Horsfield, Ginka Kostova, Joshua Krall, Carlos D. Lemus, Kent Lidke, Andrew D. Lyons, Simon Maddocks, Jason Mayer, Andrew Nawrot, Steven Ong, Eric Pender, Joseph Phoebus, Thomas Reppen, Gaku Tada, Jens Zalzala
Character Animation Lead: David Hodgins
Character Animators: Spencer Alexander, Dan Fowler, Paul Jordan, Manny Wong
CG Modeling and Lighting Lead: Melanie Okamura
CG Modeling and Lighting Artists: Patrick Finley, Kevin Jackson, Errol Lanier, Rory McLeish, Christopher Nichols, Alex Nijmeh, Dan Patterson, Randy Sharp, Aaron Vest, Andrew Wilkoff
CG Lighting Leads: Brian Goldberg, Esdras Varagnolo
CG Lighting Artists: John Decker, Daniel Fazel, Eric Hanson, Bruce Jurgens, Michael Leung, Scott Erwin Metzger, Pavel Pranevsky, Frank A. Sabia Jr., Chris Winters
3D Integration Leads: Swen Gillberg, Nancey S. Wallis
3D Integration Artists: Nancy Adams, Robert William Crain, Rahul Deshprabhu, Darren Fisher, Christopher Otto Gallagher, C. Michael Neely, David Niednagel, Ross Mackenzie, Technical Developers, Charles Abou Aad, David J. Blumenfeld, Kirk Bowers, Matthew Cordner, Greg Duda, Matt Fairclough, Steve Galle, Charles Henrich, Alan Kapler, Michael Meckler, Robert Mercier, Erick Miller, Ryo Sakaguchi, Ryan Vance
Digital Compositing Leads: Brian Begun, Kevin Bouchez, Sonja Burchard, David Lauer, Robert Nederhorst
Digital Compositors: Ted Andre, Arthur Argote, Michael Castillo, Betsy Cox-McPherson, Gareth Dinneen, Michael Harbour, Jessica Harris, Dag Ivarsoy, Paul Lambert, David Lockwood, Michael Maloney, Michael Melchiorre, Kym Olsen, Alan Precourt, Jason Selfe, Eric Weinschenk
Digital Paint Lead: Peter Baustaedter
Digital Matte Painters: Mayumi Shimokawa, Patrick Zentis
Digital Texture Paint Lead: Brian Ripley
Digital Texture Painters: Mannix Bennett, Viraj Andrew Bunnag, Daniel Favini, Peter Pace, Marc Perrera
Digital Rotoscope and Paint Lead: Joanne Ladolcetta
Digital Rotoscope and Paint Artists: Wally Chin, Scott Gastellu, Jeff Kim, Dolores Pope, Etienne Terblanche, Christopher Wood
Software Engineers: Henrik Fält, Chamberlain Fong, Daniel Maskit, Doug Roble, Casey Vanouver, Magnus Wrenninge, Nafees Bin Zafar
Visual Effects Editor: Debra Wolff
Assistant Visual Effects Editor: Teressa Longo
Color Grader: Todd Sarsfield
Visual Effects Production Coordinator: Bernardo Jauregui
Senior Digital Effects CG Coordinator: Tom Clary
Digital Effects CG Coordinators: Brady Doyle, Christine Globke
Data Acquisition Coordinator: Geoffrey Baumann
Walkthrough Coordinator: Tom Core
Technical Assistant: Grazia Como–Ojeda
Data I/O Coordinators: Robert Edward Boas, Daniel Greenstein
Visual Effects Accountant: Bekki Misiorowski
Visual Effects Production Assistants: Jesse Harris, Timothy Martin
Visual Effects Executive Producer: Nancy Bernstein
Additional Information:
PRODUCTION
Modeling: Primarily polygonal surfaces and subdivision cages. Motion capture: Worked with Gentle Giant Studio and edited motion in Motion Builder and Maya. Motion capture blended with keyframe animation. 2D and 3D rotoscoping used. Rendering technique used most: Delayed Read Archive to render the amount of geometry needed for New York City, in-house volumetric renderer VoxelB. Average rendering CPU time per frame: varied considerably, some simulation at over 120 hours, due to fluid simulation, water render, and computer-generated people, cars, and buildings. Total production time: 20 months. Production highlight: We pushed the limits as to how much geometry we could deal with in one given scene for the rendering of New York City. A completely new computational fluid simulation tool was written for the water, and our in-house volumetric tool, VoxelB, was heavily modified to deal with both the white water and the tornados.
