Audience members attending showings of the newly released 20th Century Fox feature Fight Club will watch a nine-ton brass sculpture ball wreak havoc as it rolls from its pedestal, through a fountain and into the glass window of a cafe.

What they won’t see is that, until 3D animators and effects specialists at Toronto’s toybox got hold of the footage, the ball limply passed through the water and barely had enough force to displace air much less smash through the fountain and shatter glass.

When the ball hit the window of the cafe, for example, a pane of sugar glass was intended to explode from the force. Instead, it simply fell straight down and the ball bounced – something nine-ton balls generally don’t tend to do. As it continued through, it simply brushed aside some tables and chairs in its path.

toybox was assigned to give the ball weight and add a sense of danger that was otherwise missing from the sequence.

The team enhanced the ball moving through water, using Inferno to create a large prewake, and made the ball appear to sink more heavily down into the water, crushing the concrete below.

3D animators replaced the sugar-glass window with computer-generated glass and ran a dynamic simulation so when the ball hit, the window exploded and shards flew in every direction at the proper rate of gravity. They also inserted cg tiles falling from the ceiling and cg chairs, tables, shelves and glassware, which were crushed and flung about from the tremendous force of the ball.

The Gear: Houdini was used to create glass to smash and debris to fling. Inferno created much of the water effects and took care of final compositing.

The Artists: Dennis Berardi was visual effects supervisor; Jim Rutherford was lead 3D animator; Jeff Campbell was digital effects compositor; Michael Manza created additional 3D animation; Drake Conrad was the digital film technician; and David Fincher directed the live action.