To combat the increasing demands of VFX complexity, Weta Digital recently created a new ray-tracing renderer called Manuka along with a pre-lighting tool called Gazebo. These not only came in handy for The Hobbit finale, The Battle of the Five Armies, but will also be crucial in addressing the challenges of the upcoming trio of Avatar sequels.
“It’s hard to think of the extra light that you craft onto the scene and then make it work in a believable and efficient fashion,” says Joe Letteri, the four-time Oscar winner and Weta’s senior visual effects supervisor. “It takes a lot of time and effort to do that. And you do it in a bulk fashion.
“The idea that we could start looking at path tracing everything and doing proper light transport — and then just firing the rays off and letting them go — has always been an ideal scenario. But the computing power needed to make that happen was tremendous. You really need something that’s a little more predictable when you turn the lights on. We decided to crack this over a four-year period. The ideal sweet spot would be if we could get the software ready at the same time the hardware’s fast enough.”
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