The Maelstrom sequence far exceeded last year's exemplary work on Poseidon. This really required full-on computational fluid dynamics, a function of resolution, computational power and memory.  

According to animation supervisor Hal Hickel, the design process went much faster. "Fortunately, we had already been through the design process and figured out what looked good with barnacles and what didn't work. Plus we had some new stuff to explore: a jellyfish guy and a sea urchin and a morey eel. So that was fun. We did a whole big menu and once that got down to 10 ideas, we sent that directly to our modelers and they created them really fast and Gore was great in approving them and not overworking them."

Meanwhile, Hickel says there were a couple of new CG crabs to create as well. "One transformed from stone to crabs. Figuring out that metamorphosis was a fun and interesting challenge. Ordinarily, we'll design a character and then the modelers build it and then the creature tds chain it or put the controls in it and then the animators animate it. However, in this case, it had to work back and forth a lot. The crab was roughly built and then we started to animate tests on how it might unfold and then that was handed back to the modelers to figure out how to seam that all together when it's in its stone form. The stone crab sequence starts out with some nice character animation: there were no tough technological challenges. We could just get into the performance of these characters, which is just very weird.

"And then we had normal real world crabs when Tia Dalma is transformed into Calypso and disintegrates into millions of crabs. In both cases, one of the most challenging things was the odd group behaviors. Having thousands of them crawling around wasn't a problem, but the stone crabs had to pile up on top of one another and carry the ship along. There was no way to do that by hand--we had to figure out a procedural approach to generating that motion. And there was more of a particle approach to the other ones cascading down and sweeping away the characters on the deck of the ship."

This sequel represents the biggest disc space footprint of any show at ILM: 103 terabytes. Every evening about 70,000 processor hours was used -- the equivalent of one processor running for about eight years.  

And although the CG Davy Jones was far less complicated this time, he still posed some new challenges. "We used our tentacle solving tool for most of Pirates 2, but on Pirates 3 where's he's in all kinds of action scenes, including sword fighting, we had to look at the settings all over again to achieve those shots," Hickel adds. "Otherwise, his tentacles would just flop over his shoulder or do something else undesirable. So we had to find ways to make him look great but make the tentacles behave the way we wanted."

Davy Jones was actually a great pleasure for Knoll. "On so many productions you do, you spend such large portions just figuring out the technology and working out the aesthetics. And just when you get good at it, you don't get to reap the benefits of what was done. This happened on Pirates 2 with Davy Jones. And so it was really great to go into Pirates 3 already pretty well practiced with Davy. We got really proficient with how his tentacles moved. We even took the tracking marks off of Bill Nighy's face because we didn't need them anymore."

And what was Knoll touting, now that he's finished with the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise? ILM's record computing power on At World's End: "Every evening we used about 70,000 processor hours -- the equivalent of one processor running for about eight years. And so for the entire production, I'm estimating that we used one processor millennium and that's just at ILM. This represents the biggest disc space footprint of any show at ILM: 103 terabytes -- a new record for us. Up until February, the entire company was 75 terabytes, so we had to expand the storage pool considerably. We ended up using about 130% of ILM's previous disc space just for [this] Pirates."

Bill Desowitz is editor of VFXWorld.