This job got done earlier this year, for Sehsucht in Hamburg, but it didn’t go to air until recently. We have been patiently waiting to show it off, so here it is!

 

Once again Real Flow can’t be beaten on the organic beauty of its SPH solver, which we used for the first two shots and in some small elements on the third shot, where the tiger hits the ground.

 

Making the particles stay as a tiger was another story. I did some R&D for the tiger shots, but after a few tests we decided it was better handled in Softimage ICE, which was done by Sehsucht. It allowed more flexibility and faster iterations for when revisions to the animation came in. It was also more texture friendly in getting the tiger stripes.

As they say, horses for courses, i find that to achieve natural looking simulations you can’t force the particles too hard after birth.

 

Having said that, to get the tiger paw to form out of the main fluid was a tricky exercise in controlling particle attraction and speeds way after the original particle birth.

 

At the end of the TVC there are some particle previews to show the full simulation for the first shot and also a few versions of the tiger paw shot.