The crew of The Flying Dutchmen features a cast of characters with visual references to the ocean and its creatures, including coral, sea sponges, barnacles, mussels, hammerheads and puffer fish.

“Once we added those behaviors to our sim engine, the last thing we needed was something called ‘Sticktion,’ which is a combination of friction and stickiness. The problem was that without Sticktion, the tentacles would just slide onto each other. We really wanted them to be this heap of viscous tubes that would stick to each other and stick to his chest. And the ones at the bottom of the stack would stick there in a big matte. The biggest ones out in front that hang from his chin and moustache-like tentacles could really swing around.”

“Imagine a piece of spaghetti sticking to a leather jacket,” suggests visual effects supervisor John Knoll. “That was the effect I wanted to get. R&D added this subtle stickiness to the engine.”

“The great thing,” Hickel continues, “is that as complicated as it was, once Karin came up with basic settings for all of the controls, the sim artists got up and running very quickly. I’m pretty amazed by that, actually, because this was very stressful for me. Back in December, when we really didn’t have this working yet, there was no plan B. We couldn’t animate it by hand and we looked at other sim possibilities, but they didn’t achieve what we had in mind. There are more than 200 shots and 15 minutes of screen time of Davy and we had only one artist who knows how to do this.”

With as many as 50 animators working together on a total of 18 CG characters, there were plenty of technical and artistic challenges. “What makes these characters so complicated is that they are encrusted with sea life and we had to figure out ways to cover them with barnacles and such,” Hickel observes. “We wrote tools that the modelers used where they had a sea life picker, where they could pick a mussel or a barnacle. As our model supervisor, Jeff Campbell, said, it was a little like flower arranging. And they also used ZBrush for displacement textures for the sea life and for the characters themselves and our usual suite of modeling and paint tools.”

The crew of The Flying Dutchmen include Ogilvey, who has a sea sponge head; Palafico, whose head is a red fan coral and very translucent; Koleniko, in which one side of his face is a puffer fish and can puff up with spines; and Knoll’s favorite: a crab-like creature whose head rotates in and out of the shell.

The Kraken’s tentacles modeled in Maya. The creature was keyframe animated with some flesh sim enhancements in Zeno, courtesy of the new creature pipeline.

Then there’s the Kraken, the mythological squid monster that most are familiar with from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which plays a prominent role in Dead Man’s Chest as the instrument of Jones’ destruction. Tentacles were crucial here as well. Modeled in Maya, the Kraken was keyframe animated with some flesh sim enhancements in Zeno, courtesy of the new creature pipeline. They even had to procedurally tweak the suckers on each row of tentacles because they were too clean looking, so they randomly replaced suckers that were more rough and worn looking.

Utilizing ILM’s new fluid dynamics engine, developed in cooperation with the Stanford University research program, Dead Man’s Chest, like Poseidon, contains improved CG water, in which nifty algorithms are put through multiple processors. And thanks to Zeno, which has been described as “Maya on steroids,” you can introduce particle controls, Soft Body, Rigid Body controls and other techniques.

“We started out in parallel with Poseidon, but they got into a bit of a crisis and we loaned them my entire water crew,” Knoll admits. “They wrapped in April and I got them back to finish my shots. They really pushed the envelope. The development they did at the end of Poseidon really paid off here. We did a lot of difficult water shots right up to the last day. The crew really knew what nobs to turn to get it to look good. We used CG water around the bases of the tentacles when they’re sloshing back and forth underwater. The Flying Dutchman travels underwater and reaches the surface like a submarine, so those shots were done with CG water as well, and the Dutchman is 380 feet long. We got realistic droplet size and realistic dispersion of particles.”

The scenes on Cannibal Island, where Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) narrowly escapes, contain a large number of shots where you see different variations of the same view under different lighting conditions, so Knoll and matte supervisor Susumu Yukuhiro needed to think about a 3D solution. “We saw ads for a product called Vue. It’s designed for organic landscapes and getting realistic renders. We started playing around with it and it became our primary tool for big, exotic landscapes.”

Overall, Knoll believes Dead Man’s Chest takes character animation another step forward at ILM, especially considering Nighy’s performance. “There are not as many shots numerically as on Sith, but it’s [a greater accomplishment] in terms of the amount of shots in the time that we had. Sith had 2,400 shots in about two years and this had 1,000 shots in about five months, but the average shot complexity was higher than on Star Wars.”

Bill Desowitz is editor of VFXWorld.