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of facial movement. Once captured the company wrote the software needed to translate and solve for minor facial events. The software was developed further for offline use to produce the more robust solves necessary for realistic on-screen close-ups.

Because of the complexity of the facial capture scenes, as well as the size of the Avatar project itself, Weta decided to open their own Research & Development offices. “The research branch wasn’t designed to produce the necessary software for just this one project, but was put together to help develop advancements for the entire industry,” Joe said.

Weta was equally involved in other physical models for the movie. From my understanding, a typical animation was performed based on approximations of physical weight and space. The old way to do this was for the computer animators to start with a skeleton and placed bladder-type objects where muscles would be. By inflating and deflating these bladders, the animation would appear as though the body was actually moving.

“For Avatar we needed a full biomechanical model,

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which we designed the software for. This fiber-based model operated more like real muscles, which provided the next generation of motion modeling.” The company’s team of designers used FEA programs, writing their own solvers for the project.

According to Joe, they only produced in-house software when absolutely necessary. Much of the time they used off-the-shelf or modified packages that were already optimized for particular aspects of animation. For example, Exotic Matter’s Naiad was used for the creation of several water and explosion scenes. Naiad is a dynamics solver and simulation framework for producing animations of a number of dynamic bodies including liquids and gases. It is a commercial software package, which allows the artist to interactively construct a Naiad scene using a 3D GUI front end.

Other software used by the company includes Autodesk’s Maya, Pixar’s RenderMan Studio, The Foundry’s Nuke, and Apple’s Shake. Shake was used for stereo rendering, but first Weta engineers needed to create a stereo pipeline inside the program using Apple’s source code.

Avatar is one of those movies that will be remembered for a long time. Having grossed more than Star Wars, you’ve probably seen it. But if you haven’t, don’t wait for the video. There’s nothing like watching it on the big screen.


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