Sinbad Sets Sail on a New Journey into Water Surfaces
Prince of Egypt, Antz, The Road to El Dorado, Shrek, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron and now Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas are all heavy into water. In fact, DreamWorks co-founder and animation guru Jeffrey Katzenberg readily admits it: the studio definitely has water on the brain. And wait till next year's Sharkslayer, DreamWorks' gangster-inspired answer to Finding Nemo — it's their ultimate in waterworks.
According to Craig Ring, digital supervisor on Sinbad and lighting supervisor on Antz, water is all over the place in Sinbad and is represented by four approaches utilized on other films. "The simplest thing we've done — and it's surprisingly effective — is to take a painting of water and then do a compositing ripple distortion over that painting," Ring offers. "It looks astoundingly good but only works for very calm water like the surface of a pond." In Sinbad, this occurs, for instance, when the protagonist talks to Marina on the ship at night.
The second level up the surface water chain in Sinbad, Ring says, has to do with a fluid simulation. "It provides more control over water to make it believable and stylized. It allows you to change the wave shapes. It's great for creating an ocean surface. You just get this nice, complex ocean with big and small waves, and everything in between. But it's a single surface; there are no splashing or breaking waves. We had waves that were 30-feet high on Sinbad. We used it most prominently during the sea monster attack." However, the full-blown ocean simulation utilized on Antz and Shrek, which was inspired by Areté Entertainment's Advanced Fluid Simulator, was not applied to Sinbad because it didn't call for photorealistic splashes.
The third use of water, which DreamWorks previously used in El Dorado and Spirit, occurs during the rushing river sequence involving the Sirens, the mythological women that sing songs, entrance sailors and cause them to crash on rocks and drawn. "It doesn't look like an ocean and it's not calm," Ring suggests. "It is a rapid slashing technique used to create a surface and then send ripples through the surface. You can think of it as a bed sheet when you flip it and you feel a wave moving through the bed sheet even though it isn't moving. You combine that with animated textures that look like a swirl of color and foam. The illusion looks like waters flowing down this river. It was first really pushed on Spirit, when Rain falls into the river and Spirit saves her."
As for the Sirens themselves, they were essentially female creatures that look like living fountains. The technique was similar to the one involving the aquatic aliens in The Abyss. When the Sirens rise out of the water, they splash up like a wave, float in the air and then fragment into a million drops of water as they try to sweep the sailors off the ship.
Ring says they were very careful not to show anything risqué on the Sirens. "We pushed the speed and scale a lot during the Sirens sequence. There was this huge wall of rock that everything rushes into. We wanted to integrate 3D with stylized, traditional splashes hitting rock, so we had 2D animators draw splashes, which we texture-mapped onto little cards and emitted these cards like a particle simulation coming off the rocks. Instead of being photoreal, it allowed us to get bigger, more complex splashes than you could affordably draw because we were multiplying that same slow animation hundreds or thousands of times in the shot. But it still has a feel that integrates well with the drawn characters."
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