CoP 3: Case Study 2 'Twister' (1996)

The second case study I wanted to do was 'Twister' the 1996 thriller about storm chasers creating advance weather alert systems while dealing with violent tornados. I chose this film because it was the film that set the bench mark for creating realistic tornados using particle simulations, and again ILM was faced with the task of realistic tornados but with the help from Stefen Fangmeier who had experience in creating tornados due to the fact that he worked with the National Centre for Supercomputing at the University of Illinois learning the science behind how tornados were formed.

Jan De Bont, the director, wanted real tornados in his film but after the photograph team attempted to chase a tornado, they had not luck. This meant that ILM had to develop a new effects systems that would contribute to bring realism into the way of creating a tornado. Fangmeier explained that, "a tornado is a ton of dirt and dust in a swirling mass along with moisture and cloud matter, that makes particle systems really the foundation of a tornado" (Fangmeier. S, 2016). This meant that ILM had no other choice but to use particle simulations for the tornados so that they could get the realism effect. However back in 1996 they didn't have the technology we have today so the computers produced low quality simulations.

The technology that ILM used for the film ‘Twister’ was a piece of 3D software called ‘Wavefront Dynamation’, which Fangmeier also added some plug-ins that ILM was using of other films. They used another software called ‘Softimage3D’ to do all the animation in. For the architecture of the tornado there would be around five to ten million particles. But before starting the simulations the animators first constructed and created a routine for the movement of the tornado using a wireframed funnel that could be manipulated to move like a tornado. So using the wireframe funnel ILM were able to animate it with different controllers and the emit particles off of the wireframe funnel to create the tornado effect.

This is a great way of controlling the tornado and adding character elements to the movement, but I don't think that this technique is what I'll be using for my simulations because times have changed and I can produce something like this without using a wireframe being the controller.