HMS Coventry.

Camouflage were commissioned to create a large number of photo-real battle scenes, depicting the final minutes of HMS Coventry, which was sunk by Argentine Aircraft during the Falklands War (25th May 1982).

The entire content of the shots were built in 3D, which included models of HMS Coventry, HMS Broadsword & the Skyhawk aircraft. For the water, the team experimented with a new fluid and ocean dynamics system. This was used to create the realistic bow waves and ship wakes. Some serious number crunching went into calculating the water movement around the ships!

One of the biggest challenges was the length of the shots. The client wanted to play out the bombing runs from several miles out, to the point of impact and then be able to view these from multiple POVs. Camouflage supplied VFX supervision on the reconstruction drama shots of the Argentine pilots, which were used to intercut with the CGI sequences, to give a real sense of build up to the final strike on the Coventry.

The length of the shots, the many layer passes and the massive amount of data required per frame for the water movement, really put the team’s pipeline & renderfarm through its paces!