Comments on: The making of Avatar – some juicy details

By: Armand Niculescu

Armand Niculescu — Tue, 18 May 2010 12:36:20 +0000

I’m happy that you loved the movie, but please try to use proper spelling and grammar next time, OK?

By: dean

dean — Wed, 12 May 2010 05:35:58 +0000

that movie is like so good
like it wos like real to me
i do not no what to say
but wow
if i avr head a shot be one of thos Avatar’s that would mak my day
it would be alot of fun doin it
yea but it would be alot of work but at the sam time it would be fun as will
i seend the movie like now 8 times so far and i really love it
its to the pont that i spak like a Avatar
that is what it taks to be a akter and i can evein fak cry alot so yea i hop to see a nother
Avatar movie

By: Drakaran

Drakaran — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 18:02:21 +0000

thanks for the quick reply on the rendering. I can believe the use of Houdini for the muscles, it has a great system for visualizing muscle mass and attachment (including realistic muscle jiggle and the like), but it’s really long-winded to set up for as you have to describe so much in the process.

Anyway, I really appreciate this article cause it’s so hard to find out the production aspects of animation behind the scenes for those interested in the industry.

By: Armand Niculescu

Armand Niculescu — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 17:08:46 +0000

Weta and ILM used Renderman.
The scenes with the human base (Hell’s Gate) were done by Framestore, not sure what they used (someone mentioned Houdini).
My understanding is that they created a whole muscle system for some of the animals and Na’vi faces.

By: Drakaran

Drakaran — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 16:26:36 +0000

What was the main render engine for the scenes? Was it Pixar Renderman? And is there any more info on how weta built the animals? When you talk about the various internal layers, were they ALL modeled like how muscles are, or was it some other method? Or were they used as subcutaneous layers for rendering?

By: Pompoko

Pompoko — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:12:51 +0000

Weta Digital would have come up with their own compression tool in their rigging pipeline, so they can go in there and continually improve/refine tool specifically to how they want in not just Avatar but any subsequent movie projects they’ll be working on. So it’s a better investment for them to come up with their own most of the time.

Wait till DVD’s or Bluray comes out, and you’ll see that they even went extra miles to create all the tiny muscle and tendon twitches on neck and all other body areas, which audience won’t see until they see it frame by frame…but it’s there to up the whole realism of each Nav’i

Different look in between Na’vi characters can vary on the following reasons:

1) Different stage of production ~ some of the shots that were rendered as early as back in mid/late 2008 might have less tweaked shader changes to renders at the end of 2009, which would have no doubt be a more mature tweak.

2) Variation of environment ~ According to the setting of environment (bright sun, gloomy day, rainy day, in the open, midst of jungle…etc.), Lighting TD’s will set different IBL’s as well as other lights positioned/angled around characters accordingly to that particular shot, hence will be affecting overall skin tone and translucency of any character and varies in between shots.

3) Different Lighting TD’s ~ There’s over 100 Lighting TD’s worked on Avatar, so it’s hard to keep consistency throughout shots…even within sequence where you ideally want lighting continuity from shots to shots, there can be slight difference in tone simply because each lighting TD’s have their own technique and experience to put into their lighting shots. However most of these can be amended/controlled by CG supervisers’ directions and of course James Cameron’s perfectionist eyes…and last but not the least…final comping can tweak and fix any major difference in tones between shots.

Above reasonings are just my personal guessing, so don’t take it too literally as the right answer

Anyway a great article that sums up overall technical accomplishment of Avatar!

By: Hand Solo

Hand Solo — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 07:02:55 +0000

Or, just use the one that comes with Maya.

By: George

George — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 07:29:32 +0000

You already have a plugin to do things like compresion in Maya
check

http://kickstandlabs.com/site/stretchmesh/stretchmesh-features/

By: freek Hoekstra

freek Hoekstra — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 21:07:19 +0000

great article,
thanks a lot for this. i was wondering how they got the skin to look so great.
also the movement of the lips over the teeth
and compression when the characters grab and kiss.
amazing artwork…

a sub-surface absorption layer, interesting.
this is proprietary technology i assume..
(pity ) but it makes sense.
ps any knowledge about it being used differently among characters.
(for instance jake’s avatar seems more “translucent” then neytiri’s in the above shot)
it could be lighting, but it seems the shader is different.

another thing for me are the enviroments and plants, they are wonderfull,
not only by design but the rendering quality s of the chart…
i first believed they were actually filmed,
they had me fooled…

in any event…
this movies artwork amazes more and more every time.
hat’s off to all who worked on it!