The company was founded by Peter Jackson, Richard Taylor, and Jamie Selkirk in 1993 to produce the digital special effects for the film Heavenly Creatures.[5] As of 2023, Wētā FX has won seven 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), Bridge to Terabithia (2007), Avatar (2009), The Jungle Book (2016), and Avatar: The Way of Water (2022).[6]
In 2010, a texture painting application developed by the studio for Avatar called Mari has been bought by The Foundry Visionmongers.[23] For The Adventures of Tintin and Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the studio developed a new grooming system called Barbershop where users can interactively manipulate digital hair. This tool received a Sci-tech award in 2015.[24] The Adventures of Tintin was Weta Digital's first fully animated feature film.[25]
For Avatar: The Way of Water in 2022, Wētā worked on 3,240 visual effects shots, 2,225 of which involved water.[57] The studio developed new performance capture technology for the film's underwater sequences.[58][59][60] The digital water in the film was created by artists using Wētā's latest Loki simulation software.[61] Wētā also refined their Facial Action Coding System (FACS) from Alita: Battle Angel for its use in Avatar: The Way of Water.[62][63][64][65] The company eventually ended up rendering close to 3.3 billion thread hours.[66] Letteri won his fifth Academy Award for his work on the film.[67]
The Weta Digital acquisition came as game engines like Unity and Unreal were increasingly being embraced by Hollywood studios as the basis for their digital-effects work. The deal was also part of an expensive wave of corporate acquisitions Unity undertook after its late 2020 IPO. That buying spree included cloud gaming-service Parsec, mobile ad giant Ironsource, and 3D collaboration company SyncSketch, to name just a few.
Relying on local machines or a private data center limits capacity and also requires maintenance that can be costly and time-consuming. By capitalizing on the secure, unmatched infrastructure of AWS to power its artist-driven VFX and animation workflows, Weta can access compute resources as needed with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), including G4 instances that are tailored for digital content production and feature NVIDIA GPUs. With the broadest and deepest global footprint for content creation, AWS helps Weta accelerate its global expansion and key portions of film production, in addition to strengthening its local operations to enable teams to collaborate remotely.
How did Weta Digital got involved on this show?
We were first approached in December 2010. Ridley had an early design for the engineer and had a maquette which he lit, put on turntable, shot some footage and sent it to us to see if we could match it. We built the model digitally from scans, recreated the material properties of the skin and added a facial rig so that we could articulate the model and bring it to life. The results gave Ridley the confidence to pursue using digital creatures for the film.
How did you use Deep Compositing on this show?
Deep compositing is now standard at Weta Digital, where we find it has numerous advantages. Its biggest use was probably in the engineer/trilobite fight where we had such a tight integration of digital tentacles and the practical engineer.
It was originally a huge headline that minted Sir Peter Jackson a billionaire. The director of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit films sold the digital VFX tools business for $1.625 billion, in a deal which included dozens of award-winning visual effects plugins for 3D graphics programs like Maya and Houdini as well as the 265 computer programmers coding and maintaining that software. The original deal resulted in Jackson creating a new company, WētāFX, which he still has ownership of and still employs digital artists and studio management that went on to win another Oscar for Avatar: The Way of Water.
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At Weta studios, another guy named Dan had prepared a presentation on motion capture technology for us that covered similar ground to the one from the night before, but kind of more in-depth. We talked about scrubbing in real-time and key frames and funnelling and stereoscopic cameras and polygons. I asked Dan what he thinks will happen next in digital filmmaking, and he said the biggest change will be that actors will be more excited by a role that requires them to "suit up". "Increasingly, actors are realising that they're acting, it's not some second-rate gig," said Dan.
We caught up with Scott Chambers, Compositing Supervisor, Alessandro Saponi, CG Supervisor, and Guy Williams at Weta Digital, to explore how they created a living, breathing and acting digital human in the form of Junior.
Weta Digital, the digital production house that designed the hit movie AVATAR recently donated about 300 IBM HS20 blade servers to Whitireia Community Polytechnic in Porirua which will use them to help teach students how to create 3-D animations. The IBM HS20 blade servers were originally bought to produce special effects for The Lord of the Rings at a cost of more than $1 million (for more details on this, check out this November 2004 article from DigitalArtsOnline.co.uk.) Weta Digital has since replaced them with more powerful HP BL 2x220c G5 servers supplied by Hewlett-Packard, which were used for AVATAR.
Each project required around 2,000 digital effects shots and when he divided up the work and assigned 500-shot sequences to supervisors working under him, Letteri realised he had found a model for handling multiple film projects without sacrificing quality.
Specialists in creating rich fictional worlds, our Design Studio is inspired by projects at any stage of development. From blockbuster films and TV series, to public and private art sculptures, digital games, and immersive visitor experiences, we love to collaborate with our clients in service to their vision.
Weta Digital is a world leading visual effects company based in Wellington, New Zealand. We provide a full suite of digital production services for feature films and high end commercials, from concept design to cutting edge 3D animation.
Weta was formed in 1993 by a group of young New Zealand filmmakers including Peter Jackson, Richard Taylor and Jamie Selkirk. It later split into two specialised halves-Weta Digital (digital effects) and Weta Workshop (physical effects).
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