Yes. Most of it is fully synthetic (including sky, plane, missile and all of Washington, DC you see there), with Krakatoa being used for the Nanomites eating the plane and the missile trail which was simulated in FumeFX but had to be rendered in Krakatoa for memory limitation reasons.
The Nanomites were rendered in many layers using the Particle rendering mode of Krakatoa. The particle animation was done mostly using Particle Flow and Box #3 Data Operators.
The missile trail though proved to be tricky, because the scene was animated in more or less real-world scale AND in real-world speed. Thus, with the missile moving fast and trying to avoid the chasing plane, the FumeFX simulation grid had to be huge, and only a small portion of it was actually populated voxels. Still, it required around 64GB of RAM to render in Scanline or VRay and we did not have network machines with that much memory to do that at the time. So we tested with getting the data out of FumeFX and rendering it in the newly implemented Voxel mode of Krakatoa. Sitni Sati were very helpful in providing us with the FumeFX SDK so we could make Krakatoa create one particle per voxel directly from the FumeFX simulation and then render the resulting data a bit more efficiently. Since Krakatoa renders one “scanplane” at a time and not the whole 3D volume, it needed less than 600MB for the same data. It might have been slower, but it could be rendered on hundred network machines if necessary as memory wasn’t an issue anymore.
So the missile trail was rendered as direct FumeFX rendering, not PFlow particles driven by FumeFX.
You can watch a video of one of our Siggraph demos last year related to those effects here:
http://area.autodesk.com/player/loader.swf?p=/player/main.swf&f=http://areadownloads.autodesk.com/oc/ibc09/sig09_d2_frantic01.flv
You can also read more about Krakatoa in last year’s movies in my blog:
http://lotsofparticles.blogspot.com/2010_01_01_archive.html
