It might not have been as daunting as raising the Titanic, but for the animators at Toronto’s Optix Digital Post & fx, floating Napoleon’s Lost Fleet was challenge enough.

Asked to create 25 animated scenes for a documentary about a diving expedition in search of French ships sunk in a historic naval battle, Optix created animations using LightWave 3D, the same software used in several key simulations for the film Titanic.

Although the two-and-a-half-year-old post-production shop had used similar animation before, Napoleon’s Lost Fleet was particularly challenging, says Robert Peace, the company’s director of operations.

‘The animations were more sophisticated than they had been before,’ he says. ‘We were really trying to recreate realistic shots that were integrated into live-action scenes during battle. So it’s fairly extensive.’

The documentary follows a diving team, led by marine archeologist Frank Goddio, as it searches the wreckage of Napoleon’s once-formidable flotilla sunk in 1798 by the British navy commanded by Horatio Nelson. The battle was one of the most decisive naval clashes in history.

Among the ships, which now rest at the bottom of Abu Qir Bay, near Alexandria, Egypt, was L’Orient, at the time the world’s largest battleship.

Because there were very few reproductions of the ships, animators were faced with the difficult task of modeling the vessels from scratch. ‘The only references we had were paintings and a photograph of a model of one of the ships,’ Peace says.

Animators focused on two ships, L’Orient, the premier vessel in the French navy, and the British ship Vanguard.

The one-hour documentary, due to run on Discovery Channel in the u.s. in August, was produced by Toronto-based CineNova Productions. Optix and CineNova previously collaborated on Cleopatra, a two-part program which also ran on Discovery.

For Napoleon, Optix also did online work, plus some special effects compositing of the animation.

Because the live-action scenes were shot on location in Egypt using video equipment conforming to European standards, the Optix team created animations in 601 pal, output at 25 frames per second. Compositing was output uncompressed to D1 pal.

Using LightWave 3D to recreate such scenes as the climactic battle between Vanguard and L’Orient, Optix senior animator Mohammad Ghorbankarimi worked on little else for three months. It was, he says, his most difficult project to date.

‘The most difficult part was creating the water, smoke and fire in a realistic mode,’ Ghorbankarimi says.

‘We had to show Napoleon’s boat in the water and sinking. It was really hard in this short time to [simulate] realistic water and waves created by the movement of the boat.’

Using LightWave, Ghorbankarimi began by modeling the outlines of the ships in polygons, irregular digitized shapes used to create computer-generated images. Some of the shots required up to 700,000 polygons.

Typically, three-dimensional animations are constructed either through polygons, which are laid out as a contiguous mesh structure, or as splines, which are mathematically defined smooth 3D curves. nurbs (nonuniform rational b-splines) are the most commonly used spline-based applications. Because they can be handled with more precision, nurbs are considered better for creating organic shapes. Polygonal tools, however, handle such tasks more efficiently.

Because of time constraints, Ghorbankarimi stuck mostly to polygonal modeling.

Once the modeling was finished, Ghorbankarimi began the time-intensive process of creating physical scenes – adding water, the ship’s planking, masts and sails, and giving all these elements authentic texture.

There was also the process of creating different scenes at different times of the day and night. Because of the angles of sunlight and cloud cover, each scene required a fresh approach.

The final layers, the clouds and smoke from the explosions, were done in LightWave and with a Jaleo system in the compositing stage.

‘There are some scenes that you wouldn’t know were animated,’ says CineNova post-production supervisor Lynn Vanrooyen, adding that making the animation real was paramount to the production.

The animation, she says, really helped provide a sense of what actually happened on the water between the French and British flotillas.

One of the most compelling uses of the animation, Vanrooyen says, flowed from a sequence of the wrecked hull of L’Orient. Through animation, the ship reassembles on screen until it actually rises up out of the water.

Optix has created similar, though less extensive, animations on commercials for such products as Oreo Cookies and McDonald’s.

The company also provides offline and online facilities for the Alliance Atlantis series I Was a Sixth Grade Alien, which is being shot with a Sony HDW 700 high-definition camcorder. The series is due to run on ytv and Fox Family in the u.s.

Optix also recently opened a new media division that will handle cd-roms and website design.