“I SEE YOU.” That is the line spoken in both James Cameron’s original Avatar (2009) and its first sequel, the incredible Avatar: The Way of Water, released this past December, when the native Na’vi characters look into each other’s eyes and see the person within. And with the Oscar®-winning visual effects (VFX) at Weta FX in New Zealand, he and his team have developed and utilized, the phrase takes on new meaning. The CG animated characters are not cartoons—they are people. And we see them, from the inside out.
For the production of the original film, the team developed and used a unique “Performance Capture” system. Rooted in a Motion Capture system, the technique captures the performance of an actor’s body by recording and deciphering markers placed at key points on the body, and essentially creating a skeleton that drives those same points as the basis of an animated character. Performance Capture extends the system by adding a facial camera rig, which adds the true facial expressions of the actor in their performance of a scene.
The resultant animation from Weta is so life-like, it can be easy for to forget one is watching alien characters, and not human actors.
Not long after the release of the first film, Cameron, his longtime producing partner Jon Landau, and the production team discussed improvements they would like to make for upcoming sequels to make the performances even more lifelike. They also brought back Virtual Production Supervisor Ryan Champney, who became part of Cameron’s company, Lightstorm Entertainment.
Design
As planning for the new film was beginning, Cameron worked with Production Designers Dylan Cole and Ben Procter who created concept art based on the director’s script. “He uses those to bash out story ideas while they were writing,” explains Lightstorm Executive Producer and Visual Effects Supervisor Richie Baneham, walking through the script with him and mapping out scenes. Cole’s work focused on everything present in the natural world of Pandora where its inhabitants, the Na’vi, live.
Procter’s designs were focused on the elements of the human world—the human environments, ships, gear and vehicles. Cole’s and Procter’s concept art is then turned over to Lightstorm’s teams of visual effects artists, working out of offices attached to the company’s soundstages in Manhattan Beach, CA.
The Environments artists there take that art and begin modeling each of the assets—molding and sculpting everything from the physical environments in which the scenes take place to Na’vi characters, creatures, animals, every piece of costume, plants, vehicles, weapons and more—a total of more than 38,000 individual assets, all of which have to be created before Performance Capture can take place.
The artists not only develop the 3-dimensional models to be
