SANDS OF TIME

The first third of the movie takes place on an island surrounded by sand rather than water…

“The sand simulations pushed us way past every limit that we ever had in terms of simulation time,” remarks Mr. X digital effects supervisor Ayo Burgess. “We had shots in the beginning with the sand ship where the turnaround time was almost two days to get all of the pieces of the simulation through. On top of that we had a point replication procedure that allowed us to increase the density of the sand even more at render time.”

A critical piece of technology was the cloud rendering provided by Microsoft Azure. “It was hugely beneficial for pushing shots through and getting things rendered,” states Burgess. “But the caches were so big we couldn’t upload them to the cloud, so we had to render them all on premises. It was a real fight to get these heavy caches going. It was a lot of heavy simulation, low-quality renders, getting the composites through, iterating until we got the performance of the sand that we liked and then pulling the trigger, rendering in high quality and refining it from there.”