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
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