Picking up where the Reef Unit left off was the Sharks/Sydney Unit, under the direction of Steve May. This group took on a wide variety of scenes with diverse locations, including the submarine set where the sharks meet, the fishing net scene with hundreds of thousands of grouper fish, the scene inside the blue whale, and all of the shots in Sydney Harbor from the boat marina to the sewage plant.
May explains, “The submarine is supposed to be like a haunted house. It’s very spooky and creepy. There are nearly 100 mines surrounding the sub and we worked hard to cover them all with moss and have them move with the surge and swell of the ocean. Inside the sub, it’s supposed to feel very tight all the time. It’s crammed full of knobs, valves and pipes. Because we had our own layout and modeling people, we were able to quickly build and dress the sub as we went. We knew what we needed and built customized parts along the way.”
One of the big challenges for May and his team was simulating the splashing water inside the blue whale. “Pixar really hadn’t done splashing water before,” adds May. “We had to figure out a way to do three-dimensional water, develop the software and new techniques for running simulations to compute the motion of the water, and then render it to look realistic. And the entire time, the whale is swimming and going up and down. Water had to explode and splash all around as the whale’s giant tongue lifts Marlin and Dory out of the water. This was a whole different water dynamic than the film’s underwater scenes, and we had to allow for the large-scale behavior of the crashing water and the very small detailed behavior of our two fish characters. Those different resolutions were very difficult to accommodate. Lighting that scene was probably the hardest thing we’ve ever had to light because the entire set was moving, organic and filled with splashing water.”
Jesse Hollander and the Tank Unit were responsible for all of the lighting, modeling, shading and rendering associated with the dentist’s office and the fish tank. Creating the tank itself and dealing with issues of reflection and refraction were a major challenge for this resourceful group. They also built a wide range of set pieces for their scenes ranging from dental equipment to the tiki heads and volcano in the tank, and nearly 120,000 pebbles on the tank floor. Their work included new breakthroughs in the way cloth, human hair and skin are accomplished with computer animation.
“One of the biggest things that our unit had to develop for this film was the reflections and refractions connected with the tank,” recalls Hollander. “Our starting point was the actual physics of what happens to light when it enters not just water, but a glass box filled with water. This meant computing for glass, then water, then glass into water. But in our movie, we’re not dealing with just physics, we need to be able to have control over those physics. Most of the time we were able to achieve the effect we wanted by offsetting the camera. At certain angles inside the tank, there is something called TIR – total internal reflection – where the glass becomes a perfect mirror. We play off this quite a bit with the characters of Deb and Flo. At other angles, the view from the tank shows double imagery. Whenever we’re inside the tank, we always use reflections. Refractions become more of a selective thing and we only use them where necessary.”
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