Rendering tons of sand
Chris Allen, Doug Bloom, Jonathan Cohen, Laurence Treweek · 2007
On Spider-Man 3, one of the villains is the Sandman, a character composed of sand. Sony Pictures Imageworks needed to render Sandman both as a solid form and as flowing sand grains, which in some scenes consisted of hundreds of millions of grains, and in some scenes the grains were close enough to the camera to see fine detail. This sketch describes our tools and workflow for rendering so many grains with RenderMan and controlling the level of detail for a consistent look.