Discovery Channel Ident

"We knew going into this project that the technical challenges would be immense. Especially for a television promo, this level of 3D is quite unheard of. Mark and Lauren were our first and right choice to provide our in-house artists with the high level ocean simulations that were necessary, they worked with us very closely all the way through the rendering and compositing process to ensure that the look was being realized correctly. Mark's high-level technical background proved to be the magic bullet needed to get this project done, delivering the feature quality we needed." Dan Schmidt, VFX Supervisor, Engine Room VFX

Working with Engine Room VFX in Hollywood, Fusion Studios provided 3D fluid assets for a large stormy ocean surface for the Discovery Channel Ident for a new season of the Emmy Award-winning series, Deadliest Catch. Engine Room VFX handled logo design, solid geometry and camera animation, texturing, lighting and rendering while Fusion focused on creating the voluminous fluid elements for all aspects at and above the ocean surface.

The two studios exchanged Maya scene assets on a near daily basis, with Engine Room interfacing with the director and making revisions to the animation, while Fusion created iterations of ocean surface, surface foam, cresting waves, logo splashes, spray and mist elements and delivered these to Engine Room for rendering. With the full set of 3D assets in their possession, Engine Room had maximum capability for creative changes to camera, shading and lighting.

The piece required Fusion to redevelop a variety of their ocean tools to give the surface greater integrity for the close-up viewpoints, to make major elements of the wave-field directable, to make a more dynamic and faster-simulating surface foam layer, and fuller cresting waves.

Check out the press section to see coverage in Entertainment Engineering magazine and VFXTalk.com.

Music by: Michael Richard Plowman