Elastic Takes On Marvel's Daredevil with RealFlow

Elastic’s task on this project was to render the entire NYC neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen in fluid, sticky blood. The blood needed to be detailed and nuanced in the way it behaved, but also seem elegant and simple as a visual form. Scale would vary from tiny objects to epic cityscapes, but all had to feel consistent and be technically achievable. “Our team consisted of about eight people in total, working within a timeframe of about a month,” said Andrew.

“Four to five people were active at any one time. We had a very specific vision for the stickiness and viscosity of the liquid, and that meant the team faced a huge challenge to create something on a vast scale that exactly hit that mark."

"We used RealFlow to form phantom sculptures by flowing fluid around the shapes of models, which are invisible. We used directable velocity – that is, the speed relative to the direction we were interested in - and developed custom fields to control the fluids to flow along the surfaces of the sculptures. We also carefully remeshed and linked together various simulations and played with the world space scale to cheat speed.”

They did find some bubbles in the final meshes, which they had to paint out in compositing. They needed to use 2D textures for the mesh but because the UVs didn’t give enough control to do what they wanted, they decided to animate 3D texture projections in Maya to give the appearance that the textures were flowing with the liquid.

“We used RealFlow nodes to push as much simulation and meshing to the render farm as possible, which saved us a lot of time by freeing up artists’ machines and letting them continue moving forward creatively," Andrew said.

“We’ve used RealFlow many times before, and generally try using it first if a job requires realistic fluid behaviour. On this project, we wanted to be able to control the fluid behavior in a specific way, but still have the simulation feel natural. Also, the idea of coating models in a fluid seemed to cater to RealFlow’s strengths.”