Achievements
To date, Weta Digital has won five Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), King Kong (2005), and Avatar (2009).
Weta Digital has developed several proprietary software packages to achieve groundbreaking visual effects. The scale of the battles required for The Lord of the Rings film trilogy led to the creation of MASSIVE, a program which can animate huge numbers of agents: independent characters acting according to pre-set rules. To recreate 1933 New York for King Kong, Weta created CityBot, an application which could "build" the city on a shot by shot basis.
Kong’s fur also required the development of new simulation and modeling software. A set of tools that combined procedural and interactive techniques added wind to the 460 billion individual strands of fur and modeled interaction with other surfaces. New shaders were written that accounted for the scattering of light from within each hair that added to the volumetric quality of the fur. Large chunks of fur were ripped out and filled in with scars, blood, and the mud of Skull Island. Each frame of fur took 2 gigabytes of data.
For James Cameron's "Avatar", Weta modified MASSIVE to give life to the flora and fauna on Pandora, for which the company did most of the visual effects with the four-time Academy Award winner visual effects guru, Joe Letteri. Recently the company has developed their motion capture technique to be able to leave studio for shooting on location, as utilized on the Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
Read more about this topic: Weta Digital
Famous quotes containing the word achievements:
“Fathers are still considered the most important “doers” in our culture, and in most families they are that. Girls see them as the family authorities on careers, and so fathers’ encouragement and counsel is important to them. When fathers don’t take their daughters’ achievements and plans seriously, girls sometimes have trouble taking themselves seriously.”
—Stella Chess (20th century)
“There are some achievements which are never done in the presence of those who hear of them. Catching salmon is one, and working all night is another.”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)
“Freedom of enterprise was from the beginning not altogether a blessing. As the liberty to work or to starve, it spelled toil, insecurity, and fear for the vast majority of the population. If the individual were no longer compelled to prove himself on the market, as a free economic subject, the disappearance of this freedom would be one of the greatest achievements of civilization.”
—Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979)