“The way we developed the performance capture workflow on 'Avatar' is we have our virtual camera, which allows me to, in real time, hold a camera — it's really a monitor — in my hands and point it at the actors and see them as their CG characters,” Cameron said… “It's this amazing ability to quickly conjure scenes and ...
To achieve this, the actors wore motion-capture suits with marker points and cameras on their heads, and performed on an open platform while a computer created their skeletons in real time to drive the movement of the CG characters. Here is the Avatar Featurette: Performance Capture on YouTube: An error occurred.
In a recent interview with Metro at the 2023 Baftas, at which they won the award for Special Visual Effects, Avatar: The Way of Water VFX artists and supervisors Joe Letteri, Daniel Barrett, and Eric Saindon reveal that the film only has two shots with no CGI.
They Filmed Entirely CGI Scenes Without Storyboards
With how much planning is required to make a completely CGI scene turn out to the filmmaker's liking, it's extremely rare to go into filming without a thorough plan for how the characters and camera will move.
How Avatar’s VFX Became So Realistic | Movies Insider | Insider
Why does the avatar look so realistic?
The CGI was used to create the film's digital characters and environments, while the practical effects were used to create the physical sets and props. The end result is a film that features some of the most realistic and expressive digital characters ever created.
How long did it take to render each CGI frame in Avatar?
To get the perfect shot, the company averages around 500 iterations per shot, each of which contains thousands of frames. Rendering each frame took 8,000 thread hours, or the combined power of 3,000 vCPUs in the cloud for an hour.
The original film was around 70 to 75% computer generated but for this sequel that percentage is said to be 90%. "We wanted to capture more nuanced, high-fidelity performances, to realise them in even greater photo-reality than we did on the first movie," says Landau.
As for the technical part of filming, the crew created a series of decks using unistrut systems hooked up to gantries and chain motors that could be lifted out of the water. Sets could be built above the water and then lowered down when it came time to film.
Despite all those long skin-pruning sessions in the tank and the vast quantities of water in the sequel, nearly all of the water in the film is computer-generated.
Filming Avatar, there were 120 of these cameras set up around the stage, in order to capture every intricacy of an actor's movement. In sum, Weta digital created over 800 computer-generated characters, as well as 1,800 visual effects shots which boasted detailed CG settings.
"Avatar: The Way of Water" is now the highest-grossing movie released in 2022. Much of it was filmed in a 120-feet-long, 60-feet-wide, and 30-feet-deep tank. The crew developed new motion-capture techniques for underwater filmmaking.
The primary reason for Avatar's 15-year development is that the technology of the late 1990s simply wasn't good enough to cope with the demands of Cameron's concept.
Plainly, the major reason why Avatar 2 took so long is the long pre-production state, a result of Cameron's commitment to the special effects that set Avatar apart from other films of its time to begin with.
In the case of the “Avatar” sequel, the action and underwater sequences will run at a higher frame rate, allowing the motion to look better and more realistic, while dramatic scenes have been adjusted to look like the traditional 24 frames per second standard that audiences are accustomed to.
However, following the announcement in May 2019 of three new Star Wars films, the sequels' release dates were pushed back by two years, with Avatar 3, being scheduled to be released on December 22, 2023.
Avatar utilizes 60% CGI imagery, with a majority of the CG character animation filmed with revolutionary new motion-capture techniques using live actors. The other 40% of the film utilizes the traditional techniques of live-action imagery. James Cameron began to work on Avatar since the early 1990s.
Dry for wet is a film technique in which smoke, colored filters, and/or lighting effects are used to simulate a character being underwater while filming on a dry stage. Fans and slow motion can be used to make hair or clothing appear to float in the current.
To tackle the task of helping create Avatar, it took the Weta Digital super computers processing up to 1.4 million tasks per day to render the movie, which consisted of processing 8 gigabytes of data per second running 24 hours for over a month.
For Avatar, Weta's super computers had to render up to 1.4 million tasks per day using RenderMan. This consisted of processing 8 GBs of data per second running 24 hours for more than a month. Often each of the film's frames took several hours to render.
The first “Avatar” (2009) ran at 24 frames per second, but for the sequel, Cameron, who has long expressed interest in another option, has hedged. If you see the 3-D version of “Avatar: The Way of Water” in IMAX, Dolby Cinema or any presentation labeled “HFR,” parts of the movie will play at 48 frames per second.
