"ILM went even further than this – they modeled the way the air was affected by the water splashes which in turn affected how the water was coming off the waves and splashes as mist and how that mist moved, and how the actions aerated the water and created white water. This is an outstanding level of realism. “The real selling point or tipping point was when we started building air simulations around all these events,” comments Cofer. “We used our Plume tool, which is our tool for doing smoke and fire simulation. It gives you very detailed air simulations. If you have a ship that breaches up through the ocean, it churns up the water, and there are all these vertices of air rotating under the wings – as it spreads its wings apart, as you go through the evolution of a water droplet, you start with a surface of water, which is meshed, and then splashes, and that atomizes to mist. And as it becomes less dense it is more influenced by the air fields. And it starts swirling, and the water structure influences those air flows. Once we found the key to the air fields around our splashes, it really injected a lot of realistic detail.”

"In addition, the artists ran separate simulations of the air around the water and coupled that to the base water simulation to produce swirls and eddies"