Milk, a source of nature, is brimful of ingredients that help youngsters to get through the day. Introducing, “The battle for the day”, our story starts with an epic scenery at dawn. Suddenly, serenity is disturbed by splashes in a white river. Flags are rising up making long trails in the waters surface. Shortly afterwards, crescendo music and sound effects are announcing chevaliers emerging out of the liquid. A gang of white knights is riding towards their mission at full force. By impressive close-ups and dynamic view points, we’re discovering that our gang is made of the liquid from which they have arisen. At the moment their leader joins in, they’re accelerating once more. By doing this, they provoke that much energy that they burst out in a huge splash and disappear as mysteriously as they came.

All of a sudden, we’re seeing a teenager grabbing a glass of milk and drinking it with large gulps. By this, we do understand that the whole action took place in the glass of milk and that our teenager is armed with the force of the knights/nutrients to get through the day. Voice-over and super: Milk. A Force of Nature.

Liquid knight (mares)

There is no such thing as instant available real moving knights made of milk! Making liquid characters is always tricky. They have to be believable, beautiful, and recognizable. So we’ve bend the laws of physics by adding “magic” forces, for instance, or by selectively removing some particles of fluid.

It was a subtle artistic/mathematical/technical work to get the desired look. It took us weeks of experimentations to find the right mix of forces, laws and parameters.

The Liquid Knights are first modeled in 3D as solid objects and then animated as “regular CGI characters” Then we used three layers of liquid simulations to build up the desired effect.

- first a liquid layer very close to the animated knight surface (the most difficult to set up)

- a second liquid layer forming trails left behind the character

- a third layer of impacts in the milk surface (that is almost physically correct)

At the current state of computing power, it is virtually impossible to put the whole scene with the 3 layers together as a whole. Just one layer of a knight could take up to several days of simulation on a computer (and we do have fast computers…). Result, we had to made separate simulations for each knight and horse and blended them all together in compositing.

A final word on milk itself

Making it look as milk did also bring its own layers of complexity. Indeed, Milk is a peculiar liquid: light enters its surface and while traveling inside it scatters in all directions. In the CGI industry we call that phenomena Subscattering.

So the volume inside is as important as the surface to get a proper milk look render. We had to develop special techniques to create each surface from the liquid simulations and to bring them all together as one volume for the rendering.

Nevertheless, after 3 months of working, testing, cursing, rendering, waiting, cursing again, hardly sleeping, working, panicking, finding solutions, testing again, not sleeping at all, rendering,… we’re very happy to present our gang of chevaliers.