EPTSimulating the motion of fluids is one of those areas that has gone from incredibly painful to remarkably accessible over the last few years because of the continuing improvement of computing platforms. Recently, there's been a lot more work out there that demands that kind of thing, so at work I've been helping explore techniques.
Of course, one of the first steps to that kind of thing is to find some remarkable examples of the work going on out there. So, a central point of conversation for us has been the opening sequence for David Fincher's recent version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo:
(HUGE props to the talented artists at Blur Studios, Fusion CI, and Spatial Harmonics who created this.)
Fortunately, artofthetitle.com had a fantastic, informative article on its production (and, as anyone in the field can attest, informative "making of" articles are few and far between.)
http://www.artofthetitle.com/2012/02/21/the-girl-with-the-dragon-tattoo/
(From the article, Tim Miller of Blur Studios on director David Fincher: "The first time I met him, I asked one of his friends, ‘How picky is David?’ And he said, ‘You’ve heard of pixel fuckers? Well David breaks each pixel down to its separate RGB components and fucks them one at a time.’" I know people like that.)
To see what we might be able to do for our own clients, I've been playing around lately with some of the tools used for these images, as well as others. It's startling how far this stuff has come since the last time I had a look, and for now I'm playing catch-up.
For a wider variety of this kind of thing, the RealFlow demo reel is pretty impressive:
