Brollywood
Making it rain
Making large scenes rain for real can be impractical and very expensive. Lots of water and SFX appliances are needed and even then it's not possible to cover the area required for large scenes.
For TOO CLOSE we first generated a surface for water to land on. We were able to use a proxy CG model of the bridge that had been generated in pre-production. Once the matchmove had been completed we were then able to start generating CG rain elements, falling rain and also ‘splatter’ on horizontal surfaces.
The falling rain was produced using Nuke’s 3D particle system.
A processor intensive process that also required a number of revisions to get right, we relied on AWS’s elastic computing power as well as Deadline’s AWS spot-rendering integration to give us the processing power we needed for the particle simulation. This dramatically reduced our iteration time per shot from days to hours, allowing us to refine the look of the rain quickly and efficiently to match the rain in the practical shots.
Once both the falling rain and rain splatter elements had been produced, we could then start integrating them into the shots. The falling rain elements were generated with depth passes meaning that a sense of depth/atmosphere could be adjusted to suit the shot. We also employed more conventional techniques such as adding smoke elements to the shots to act as very subtle spray clouds which both added to the depth of the shots but also randomised the perceived rain movement.
