Destroying LA for "2012"
Nafees Bin Zafar, Dave Stephens, Marten Larsson, Ryo Sakaguchi, Michael Clive, Ram Sampath, Ken Museth, Dennis Blakey, Brian Gazdik, Robert Thomas
ACM SIGGRAPH 2010 Talks
ACM SIGGRAPH 2010 Talks
Abstract
For the movie “2012”, Digital Domain was tasked with destroying its home city of Los Angeles… digitally. The destruction effects would be seen up close, and there had to be a lot of it. The solution involved turning to geometric fracturing tools, and rigid body dynamics (RBD) simulations. However, this sequence was going to require two orders of magnitude more detail than we had accomplished before.
The talk presented an RBD simulation authoring system called “Drop”. The software had a node-based workflow that was very useful for FX artists, and inspired many other developers and software packages. I received an Academy Award for Technical Achievement for this work.