Floods, Fish and a Flooded Valley

27/03/2014

Austrian satire is often mordant and exaggerated. The Austrian town of Bad Fucking, pronounced fooking', takes it to the extreme and CINEMA 4D helped create the effects for this film in truly Austrian satirical manner.

Flash is required! --

It's a fact that words that have a specific meaning in one language can have a different meaning in another. Hence, a multi-language term can have a very respectable meaning in its language of origin but can be of quite objectionable nature in another language. The Austrian author Kurt Palm took advantage of the fact that an Austrian town carried the name Fucking, whose status he then elevated to that of a spa town and renaming it Bad' Fucking (Bad is the German prefix for spa) and relocating it to the Alps for his story. He then wrote an outrageous whodunit that satirically pokes fun at the Austrian character. The result was brutally mordant Alpine satire!

The book went on to become a great success and it didn't take long until the decision was made to turn it into a movie. The seasoned director Harald Sicheritz, known for his work in both film and television, was selected to make the movie. Since the story included several fairly spectacular scenes, which could never have been realized using live footage, the Vienna-based computer graphics and animation specialists Cybertime were brought on board.

The road that leads to the tourist town of Bad Fucking winds along the edge of a narrow valley. At the very beginning of the movie, a huge avalanche blocks the road and makes in impassable. The avalanche, made up of boulders, mud and debris, crashes through the valley and flattens a car on its way. The team at Cybertime created this scene with the help of CINEMA 4D. It was particularly important to be able to control the avalanche's path, explains VFX artist, supervisor and producer G nther Nikodim. The Dynamics feature's follow position settings were extremely helpful. They made it possible for us to use simple keyframe animation to define the avalanche's path relatively precisely; the motion of individual elements was controlled using dynamics.

Flash is required! --

The simulation was then baked and converted to keyframes. The keyframes were then reduced and Alembic was used to export them to Realflow 2013 where the large boulders were used as collider objects for the fluids simulation. The meshes created in Realfow, which contained up to 25 million polygons, were then rendered in CINEMA 4D together with the boulders and all the debris in the avalanche using the Physical Renderer in CINEMA 4D. Final compositing was done in Nuke.

The rest of the movie is no less spectacular: At one point, a police officer is swept away by a tidal wave several meters high that's teaming with hundreds of eels. The eels were created entirely in CINEMA 4D using the integrated Sculpt feature in addition to other modeling tools. A simple rig was then created using Deformer objects and MoGraph was used to duplicate a total of about 3,000 eels. The water was simulated using Realflow via Hybrido2 and was imported into CINEMA 4D as a baked mesh. We first experimented with transparencies and absorption for the water's shading, which unfortunately resulted in extremely long render times, stated G nter Nikodim. In the end we omitted transparency entirely and instead used Subsurface Scattering with a long Path length. To our surprise we were able to use this method to quickly create the muddy water we needed and in the desired quality. In addition, reflections were rendered separately as Multi-Passes and then combined with SSS shading in Nuke. Realflow was used to create Splash&Foam particles, which were then rendered in CINEMA 4D.

In the end, the tidal wave leads to the closing scene in which the entire flooded valley of Bad Fucking can be seen. This live footage was edited extensively in post-production: mountains were removed and the slightly overcast sky was replaced by dark storm clouds. Color correction was used to make the scene even more sinister and foreboding. Most of this editing was done in Nuke and Photoshop. The edited material was then projected onto rough geometry in CINEMA 4D using the Camera Projection feature so that careful camera movements could be created to enhance the scene's three-dimensionality even more.

Flash is required! --

A CG water surface was then created in CINEMA 4D that consisted of a simple plane with a bump map and a highly reflective material. The unique challenge presented by this shot was the seamless integration of live footage of a swimmer in a lake into the CG water. The waves created by the swimmer in the live footage continued outside of the picture and therefore had to be supplemented digitally. CINEMA 4D's Formula deformer proved to be a fast and easy to control solution.

Cybertime's team of 3 artists completed the main scenes and innumerable smaller corrections and additions within only five months. A total of about 7 minutes of CGI scenes were created and rendered, which made it possible to add the desired exaggerated satirical components from the story line - which are surely a matter of taste. After all, satire is designed to provoke a debate with regard to its content. There's no question about the quality of the CGI effects on the other hand - they're excellent!

Movie website:

http://badfucking.at/#

LINK:	http://www.maxon.net/en/news/singleview-default/article/floods-fish-an...
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