Piranha was one of the funnest, and also most horrible jobs I worked on. It was fun because we got to create some outrageous mayhem, such as eyeballs being snatched and torn off. The more over the top, the more the client liked it. It was hell because we had 3 weeks to create 30 shots. With 3 lighters, a handful of animators, a Massive TD, and a tracker… And that was it. Also, it was decided that we’d not use the usual renderer, Mental Ray, in favor of 3Delight, because it would handle motion blur and Massive integration much better. We got the shots as overflow work when delivery schedules started looking unrealistic for the original studio and shots were distributed across town. Thus, we were handed a Piranha rig used by the original studio, which was being rendered in Mental Ray with proprietary shaders.  So we had 3 weeks not only to produce all the shots, but while implementing a rendering pipeline based on a renderer none of us had used before, including re-shading of the piranhas, which was well done by Olcun Tan. I admit that rendering all this in 3Delight was a breeze once we figured out how to use it, and it would have been much more tedious to get that out of Mental Ray. Also, we had to figure out on the fly how to setup and render shots for stereoscopy. I came out really impressed with the renderer. In fact, we barely pulled this off with steady all-nighters and a lot of pressure. The cgi on this movie was done a multiple studios, and in the following sequence, I am showcasing the shots I did, which, I think, were amongst the most successful ones in the film. This was done at Gradient Effects.

WARNING: If you are adverse to nudity and gore, skip playing…