Better Than Water offers irrefutable evidence of Gatorade's superiority to that old fashioned "water" your grandparents still think is cool. Take that, Nature!

This project represented Method's first efforts using RealFlow. Initially I was tasked with evaluating RealFlow's utility and integrating it into our pipeline. I did some early tests to see if the watery bodies could be achieved using RealFlow, but quickly determined that was impractical. Ultimately they were implemented by Laurent Ledru using Syflex, and RealFlow was used to supplement with splashes and drops.

One of my coding contributions to this spot came in the form of a technique we called acceleration maps. The workflow started with a custom MEL command which analyzed the motion of a character and generated an animated grayscale texture map expressing the points of extreme acceleration and deceleration over a period of time. We then used this animated map to emit Maya particles from those points of greatest acceleration. I also wrote an additional MEL command which exported the resulting Maya particle system into a fluid simulation in RealFlow. This allowed us to emit splashes and drops from the players in a way which responded very realistically to their motion. The above QuickTime shows one of these animated acceleration maps as well as the large and small splash elements which it generated.

I also wrote a Maya deformer for this spot which was used in one of the facial close-ups. It deformed geometry using a 2D Maya fluid, creating realistic ripples in the head and face of one of the water players. I did some particle work for the shot as well, writing a custom Maya field which attracted particles to the closest point on a polygon mesh. I used it to create droplets which traveled along the length of the face, adhering to its surface and then falling off naturally. Unfortunately it's difficult to isolate my elements from the rest of Flame artist Russell Fell's comp, but the image above at least gives a sense of where they were used.