Frantic Films is showing its suite of software tools at SIGGRAPH, including a beta version of Flood: Spray, Krakatoa, Amaretto and Awake.

Attempting to solve the problem of creating water, Frantic Films developed Flod and Flood: Surf which is used to create ocean surfaces, as well as oil, lava and rubber. Frantic used this on Superman to create the oceans surfaces. Now it introduced the beta version of Flood: Spray, which seeks to allow the creatine of waves and ocean spray. Flood and flood: Surf have been pretty impressive. I’d assumed that the oceans in Superman were real oceans that were composited. If Flood: Spray does what it sets out to do then it could be a huge boom for those VFX artists who lay awake at nightwith tremors about having to create ocean waves.
NOTE: they said they were looking for beta testers of Flood: Spray so if you are so inclined and talented, then it may be worth a call.

The particle system Krakatoa, a plug-in for 3ds Max, is very impressive. Seeing the demo it seems capable of similar effects created for the Sandman creature in Spider-Man 3, but with much less difficulty. In one demo, they showed the particles of a persons hand being slowly blown away like sand until all that remmained was the skeleton.

The last thing I saw at the Frantic booth was a simple plug-in allowing interoperability between 3ds Max and NVIDIA’s Gelato rendering software. A simple plug-in that is not extremely sexy like the ones mentioned above, but Gelato has garnered quite a bit of buzz at SIGGRAPH. In fact, rendering options and workflows in general have quietly become one of the main themes at SIGGRAPH this year. More on this later.