Comments on: A peek behind the scenes of Avatar

By: computergroups

computergroups — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 21:30:13 +0000

A peek behind the scenes of Avatar: http://www.webkitchen.be/2009/11/26/a-peek-behind-the-scenes-of-avatar/

By: Larry Shultz

Larry Shultz — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 02:28:59 +0000

spent several months working in the VAD (Virtual Art Dept) at Lightstorm on Avatar during the design phase.
Lightwave was the main workhorse to build the virtual sets mainly because we had a ton of assets that had to be created daily based on concept designs given us by the concept artists. The fast worflow enabled us to keep up with massive workload.
Much of what we created in 3d was inspected by James Cameron himself and would be appr oved by him and put into the sets under his direction. The virtual sets had to look as photoreal as possible and those were passed along to Weta for uprezing and placement. The movie itself was really made in the VAD and the shots we did were also passed onto WETA.
Lightwave was definately the workhorse during this phase. We did also use Maya and Motionbuilder but most of what was done in Maya at that stage was mainly to help translate assets from LW into motionbuilder. Whether or not anything else could have kept up with the workload is debatable to some degree. I know that the Maya artists had a difficult time keeping up with a fraction of what we were doing with LW.
The point here being that despite the hype I know what was used and how much it was used firsthand on one of the most important phases of the film. :)
Heres a link to one of the realtime pandara environments:
http://www.newtek.com/lightwave/images/profiles/imagesimage/newsletter/02_2010/avatar/Image_3_NewTek_Rob_Powers_RobOverNeteri.jpg

By: Claudio

Claudio — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 21:38:43 +0000

I think Gaspy and Darren made the point.

Apart from Photoshop, every other Adobe product was only used in preliminary work… in other words: all the things where the best of quality was not yet needed.

So please, stop worship adobe… They make really nice products, but they are not the best, in many areas…. Every stunning fx in hollywood movies come from something else (Maya, RenderMan, Nuke, Fusion)

By: Sabin

Sabin — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 01:41:52 +0000

I was also searching the net for the questions asked by guys like Gaspy. and here is what i fished regarding the softwares used in Avatar.

Autodesk MayaPixar Renderman for MayaAutodesk
SoftImage XSILuxology Modo (model design, e.g. the Scorpion)
Lightwave (low-res realtime environments)
Houdini (unknown area)
ZBrush (creature design)
Auodesk 3ds max (space shots, control room screens and HUD renderings)Autodesk MotionBuilder (for real-time 3d visualisations)
Eyeon Fusion (image compositing)
The Foundry Nuke Compositor (previz image compositing)
Autodesk Smoke (color correction)
Autodesk Combustion (compositing)
Massive (vegetation simulation)
Mudbox (floating mountains)
Avid(video editing)
Adobe After Effects (compositing, real-ime visualizations)
PF Track (motion tracking, background replacement)
Adobe Illustrator (HUD and screens layout)
Adobe Photoshop (concept art, textures)
Adobe Premiere (proofing, rough compositing with AE)

By: pranjal

pranjal — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 22:15:02 +0000

Well, Motion builder was used to edit the motion capture data.There was a mocap artist on the set to show Jim instant results of the capture.