Plume: Digital Pyrotechnics at Industrial Light and Magic by Olivier Maury (ILM)
Unfortunately we actually missed the beginning of this talk due to it being in a different building but we quickly caught on to this very mathematical way of looking at explosions in film. When we joined the presentation it was in the middle of talking about different films that they were involved in, including Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince and Avatar.
http://cgvfxing.com/2014/04/27/digital-pyrotechnics-at-industrial-light-magic-with-plume/
He then went on to talk about there GPU, which is there rendering source that they developed that can produce very high quality explosions and pyrotechnics in one single motion without having to bring the simulation back before you render.
We were then introduced to The Last Airbender which is what Plume was actually created for originally and is now the main tool for ILM and features in 20 different films so far. The software is simple but is as high level as possible and at the same time features a unified computer pattern. The software is flexible and powerful and uses a Python Source Expressions to create turbulence, reheating and local field modulations. It is very ILM artist friendly and has a powerful field sculpting tool. Plume has ready to use elements that are built into it like different explosions, dust, smoke and sticky fire. They are seen as templates but can be used as a starting point.
There were also many challenges along the way of creating this interesting software including:
- GPU memory limitations
- GPU development
- SM13 cards are not mature hardware
- GPU farm amortisation
- Lighting/Geometric Integration
So altogether Plume has created a high performance piece of software that is able to be integrated with others and as it goes through different locations and departments at ILM they are able to adapt it slightly to their purpose and still have the original version to work from. It also improved productivity in the work flow and meant that they could create a faster and more efficient way of completing a project.
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