Cherry Cherry VFX + Arnold Optimization

I and several other students are working on a side project for Cherry Cherry VFX. We are creating a short cinema sting, featuring a photo-real seagull, floating on a lifebuoy in the open ocean, and an clapperboard jumping out above it.

There was a lot to figure out with this project, mainly with the ocean as we need it to be simulated to create the splash, we need it to base animate the motion of the life buoy, and also be able to render it as a wide open ocean.

My role is mainly to do lighting, rendering and compositing, and have been helping with pipeline, especially on the water simulation.

 Harry has been working with BOSS and Bifrost to create a workflow in which we can drive the bifrost simulation near the camera using a BOSS ocean, which means we can make the splash. But further away from camera will be a tiled version of the base BOSS ocean, without the simulation.

We were struggling with long render times on the ocean as it is simulated and quite dense. We are rendering with Arnold which we have found to be slower than Renderman. By tweaking with the settings I got the time per frame down from around 30 minutes to 20. It taught me a lot about how to work in Arnold efficiently and get render times down without sacrificing quality.


We found the scale of the waves compared to the bird are off which needs adjusting.

One thing I found whilst I was optimizing the scene is that we will have to render the ocean and other objects on separate layers, as rendering with high enough settings to get the bird noise free with water in the same scene pushed render times far to high.

 The project as a whole has helped a lot with working on pipeline and organizing projects, especially for using and bringing in look development scenes to work on shaders.

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