Behind the scenes on Avatar

A write up on the 3D behind James Cameron’s Avatar. Read the entire interview here @ CGARCHITECT.com

I loved this part of the interview with WETA (Weta’s website is here):

There were bugs in every shot, enough to fill any jungle, virtual or otherwise. “Cameron asked how many bugs we had, saying ?I only see about 20.’ We told them there were 20,000,” said Williams, with a smile. “Cameron laughed that he had to have 20,000 bugs to see 20.” It was because the bugs were incredibly small, ranging from the size of a wasp down to a mosquito, and would recede into the distance by about 300 feet.

Many were hidden by the plants and the rest were hidden in the dark, so you could only see the ones flying through the god rays. Cameron had them boost the bug count to 60,000 so he could see 60 at a time. Luckily, they rendered quickly.     Click for Larger Image

“The only problem we had with the bugs is every now and then one would fly right into the lens of the camera. Some camera hog would loiter in front of the lens and hurt your stereo space and your perception of the shot.” Because of how Weta does their compositing, “painting out stuff is not too easy to do, so we had to fix it in Renders. We didn’t render with holdout mattes; we rendered using depth sorting information using deep opacities. The advantage of that is we could render the character again and again, even if we changed the motion, and not have to rerender the jungle. But the disadvantage is we had to carry around extra data sets of distance from the camera and use that to stitch it together. If you ever wanted to paint out a bug, it was really hard to paint out depth information. You could remove the bug but you would still see its ghost in the fog or in the depth of field, all of which keys off the deep opacities.”

It makes you think about the subtle depth that can be added to your architectural 3D scenes.

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