The water effects of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell no Tales

For Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell no Tales MPC faced the creative challenge to produce highly believable ocean and water effects interacting with full-CG ships and characters. This included pirate ships emerging from the bottom of the sea, a parting ocean giving space to an enormous three dimensional set, and a model ship in a bottle containing a full-sized ocean. The varied scale and nature of these effects required us to rethink our simulation techniques and toolset. In this talk we present our approaches to animate, simulate and render these using our newly developed ocean toolkit and tighter integration of Autodesk Bifrost and SideFX Houdini into our FX and rendering pipeline.