Building up a water simulation pipeline

#1

Hey folks!
I work for a small vfx studio and we got a new project offer.
For doing all the vfx work in-house, we’d need water simulation in high quality. There are war ships that get destroyed and parts of them fall into the ocean and create huge water splashes.
We didn’t work with water simulations yet, but now we’re thinking about updating our farm, recruiting a simulation artist and get a software license. The problem is, we don’t know exactly which software (there’s so much on the market…) we should take and how much renderpower we’ll need for a proper workflow. How much budget should we calculate? Has anyone experience with building up a pipeline for water simulation (it’s a cinema project!)?

Thank you very much and have a nice weekend!
Alex

#2

I have done exactly what you describe on several occasions. The best tools available right now in my opinion are either Houdini or RealFlow depending on what you use for the rest of your pipeline. Naiad was a good option for a while but it’s no longer available until Autodesk brings it back in one of their products like Maya.

Look around and see who you can get to work with before purchasing any software because they will have more experience in one or the other. When you do find someone to help out they should be able to give you in-depth estimates for the budget based on the boards and information from the client. Both Houdini and RealFlow have rental licenses which make it fairly easy to scale out quickly if you have extra render nodes available to snag.

#3

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