VFX Firsts is a weekly podcast that looks at movie milestones. On a recent edition titled “VFX Firsts: What was the first ocean simulation in a film?“, the host mentions Jerry Tessendorf, Professor of Visual Computing, and his work on the film Waterworld.
Here is an excerpt:
“For Waterworld, Cinesite purchased an 8 CPU machine dedicated to running our software, a monster of a machine at the time, and called it “stokes”. They did not want the blue sky that RenderWorld produced (they wanted to use a different sky) so we compiled a special version that omitted the sky. The executable for the water without sky was called “waternosky”. At one point someone at Cinesite asked me if it used Russian technology because “waternosky” sounded Russian.”
