For the large wave shots, we had to be very careful with the render passes. There were over 10 FX simulation packages that needed to be rendered separately to avoid exceeding the memory cap. These passes had to be set up per shot because the types of effects changed from shot to shot. Some shots were lit through lights instanced onto particles, similar to the still water shots; however, others were lit based on emission attributes that were baked onto the simulated mesh, and some required manually placed lights. Maintaining continuity while juggling all these types of effects lighting was a satisfying challenge that resulted in some of my favorite shots of the film.

The other large sections of shots I worked on were some of the more complex shots in the belly of the whale. These were handled towards the end of production. Not only did these shots take place in water with very heavy simulations for ships floating on the surface in the background, but most of the lighting came from lights instanced onto particle simulations inside the fluid simulations. These shots had to be heavily optimized in lighting, as we were at the end of production under a time crunch, and the upstream publishes were well over double the available 128 GB of memory on the farm.

The water shader was built off parameters published per shot, which were read in at render time to ensure the approved wave pattern for the non-simulated sections of the water. This mesh needed to be blended with the simulated sections of the water. Sometimes this method would break down, and the published parameters would be incorrect or published incorrectly. In cases like this, we would often have to override the shader and find where it was breaking or manually input the values on a per-shot basis.