Overview
An advanced simulation study where millions of particles trace the behaviour of liquids under changing forces. A technical exercise turned visual meditation.
The Challenge
Direct an inherently chaotic system toward deliberate, art-directed compositions without losing physical believability.
The Outcome
A flagship CGI piece demonstrating simulation range, and a cache pipeline reused across later particle work.
- ✦Hero film
- ✦Simulation setups
- ✦Stills
Process: auditioning chaos
Fluid simulation is the least obedient discipline in CGI: you don't pose a liquid, you negotiate with it. The project began by building a small 'audition rig', a lightweight scene where emitter shape, viscosity, and vortex forces could be swapped in minutes and simulated at quarter resolution. Over sixty auditions ran through that rig. Most were physically correct and visually dead; roughly a dozen produced the unexpected folds and collisions that justified full-resolution treatment.
The keeper takes shared one property: legible structure inside the chaos. A great fluid frame reads as both liquid and sculpture, and that duality only appears in a narrow band of viscosity-to-velocity ratios. Finding that band, not modelling or lighting, consumed half the production schedule, and it was the right place to spend it.
Making millions of particles feel intentional
The final simulations pushed several million particles per cache, which forced an unglamorous but critical engineering layer: chunked caching to survive crashes, versioned cache folders to allow rollbacks, and a naming convention strict enough that take 47 could be compared against take 12 a week later. Simulation work at this density is as much data management as it is artistry.
Lighting leaned on a single principle: liquids are lenses, not surfaces. The rig lights what's behind and inside the fluid rather than the fluid itself, letting refraction do the visual storytelling. A restrained two-light setup with a high-contrast environment produced more depth than any number of direct lights had in testing.
Where it landed
The film became the portfolio's flagship CGI demonstration and the piece most often cited in client conversations as 'the one that made us reach out'. The audition-rig methodology and the cache pipeline built here were reused directly on the particle-systems study, cutting its production time roughly in half.