When the trumpets sound Tuesday morning and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announces its annual Oscar nominations, could there be any more of a sure thing than that James Cameron’s mega-hit “Avatar” will grace the list of visual effects honorees?
After all, while many people have enjoyed the film’s sprawling anti-colonialism storyline, there’s little doubt that what has made the movie the highest grossing of all time is its stunning computer-generated imagery, primarily the intricate, intensely detailed and impressively realistic world of Pandora. More..
Wellington, NEW ZEALAND — 28 January 2010 — NetApp announced today it has partnered with Weta Digital, a world leader in digital effects and animation, to provide data storage for the production of the record-breaking film, Avatar. Avatar was filmed with revolutionary new motion-capture techniques, which generated more data than any other movie in history (more than the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy combined), creating a new set of challenges never before faced by the digital effects industry. More..
LOS ANGELES–(BUSINESS WIRE)–StudioGPU has entered into an agreement with Weta Workshop, a multiple Oscar® winning one-stop studio servicing the world’s creative industries, to integrate and further develop StudioGPU MachStudio™ Pro for its television production pipeline. MachStudio Pro real-time 3D workflow and rendering software allows artists, designers, engineers, directors, and technical directors (TDs) to work with 3D lighting, camera views and multi-point perspectives in an interactive non-linear fashion with real-time high fidelity views as they will appear in the final rendered format. More..
Nvidia and Weta Digital have developed an advanced ray-tracing system that is capable of quickly and accurately processing billions of polygons. The engine, dubbed PantaRay, was designed to accelerate pre-computation of scene occlusion data and dynamic image-based lighting in James Cameron’s Avatar.
“The complexity of Avatar motivated us to think about rendering differently. We do our final beauty-pass renders with RenderMan, but to optimize artistic iterations on Avatar’s huge data sets, we moved the bulk of the calculation to a pre-computation step,” explained Sebastian Sylwan, Weta’s head of research and development.
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Ringer Spy Linuxelf sends along these scans from Time Out Magazine, they mostly cover WETA’s Avatar but also mention the nefarious Dr. Grordbort! More..
Peter Jackson is secretly working to adapt the Mortal Engines fantasy novels for the screen. The hush-hush project is understood to be in early development, with work on the first of the four books under way, industry sources say. Weta Workshops is also believed to be working on designs for the science fiction series, which features giant mobile cities. A spokesman for Jackson did not deny the project was on the books yesterday, but said “any comment should come from Peter”. More..
Interested in ‘Mortal Engines’? Take a look at our links from Amazon. (try Amazon.ca as well!)
