making of avatar

[Davros]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7c4kNLz_4E8

very much worth a watch, especially what the actors had to do.

[multiweb]

Yeah that's pretty cool how they used mocap for everything including facial expressions. That must have taken huge amount of storage to record all those keys. You can really see the subtleties in the faces from the real actor to the skinned model. Most impressive. It's pretty cool too how Cameron had these special cameras made so he could move around the capture area and have the 3D environment overlaid in the backgrounbd during the actors live motion. All this realtime stuff certainly takes a lot of computer power. That's why it costed so much I guess.

[starlooker]

Saw Sigourney Weaver on The David Letterman Show a few nights back.

She said each frame takes 47 hours to create, and that there were 24 frames/sec...in an almost 3 hour show.

They must have used a supercomputer or mainframe cluster.

[multiweb]

I think they used ILM (Lucas) facilities for the final rendering. Those guys have rendering farms and are geared for it. Storage must have been huge though.

[mithrandir]

I saw WETA - Peter Jackson & co - listed in the credits. Their web site isn't up to date but they have Avatar listed.

And just about every other movie with significant CG of the last few years.

[multiweb]

You're right. ILM helped finish off (http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-10419046-52.html)special effects which is still part of production. Maybe they did render it in-house then. I guess this project was so enormous it must have been a colaboration of many different companies working on it.

[Octane]

ILM turfed out their SGI machines several years back in place of Red Hat Linux renderfarms.

H

[drbob]

Avatar's rendering was done by Weta, not ILM. For Avatar, Weta built a 40,000 processor render farm with 100 terabytes of RAM and 3 petabytes disk storage, in Wellington. There's a good article with more technical details here (http://www.information-management.com/newsletters/avatar_data_processing-10016774-1.html), if you're interested.

Weta's NZ render farm features four times in the world's top 200 supercomputer list (http://www.top500.org/) - that's a lot of hardware for a movie!

[starlooker]

Thanks for the info drbob, very interest. :thumbsup:

[multiweb]

Thanks for the link. That's interesting how the whole thing is water cooled. No air-con. Guess it doesn't get very hot down there?

[drbob]

Unfortunately for us, no, it doesn't often get hot. It's also very windy here in Wellington - I don't know if that helps with the water cooling.

[multiweb]

Real cool interview of James Cameron talking nuts'n bolts (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aao0YSITuxc&NR=1)about the capture process and technology.