Nvidia and Weta Digital have developed an advanced ray-tracing system that is capable of quickly and accurately processing billions of polygons. The engine, dubbed PantaRay, was designed to accelerate pre-computation of scene occlusion data and dynamic image-based lighting in James Cameron’s Avatar.
“The complexity of Avatar motivated us to think about rendering differently. We do our final beauty-pass renders with RenderMan, but to optimize artistic iterations on Avatar’s huge data sets, we moved the bulk of the calculation to a pre-computation step,” explained Sebastian Sylwan, Weta’s head of research and development. More..
Ringer Spy Linuxelf sends along these scans from Time Out Magazine, they mostly cover WETA’s Avatar but also mention the nefarious Dr. Grordbort! More..
First, HAPPY NEW YEAR WORLD! 2010 is ripe with promise for fans looking forward to the filming of two Hobbit movies to begin.
And next, Peter Jackson is now ‘Sir Peter’ as he was among a group of five New Zealanders awarded the status of ‘Knight’ or ‘Dame’ on the New Year’s list. In a written statement, Sir Peter called receiving the honor an “incredible moment”. “I didn’t think anything would surpass the 2004 Academy Awards, but I was wrong.”
A big thanks to all of those who sent in links about the story while we were enjoying the holidays with our families. There are many places to read more including: www.stuff.co.nz, www.nzherald.co.nz, and www.empireonline.com. Congrats to Sir Peter and his team who have had such a big impact on New Zealand and the world.
First, HAPPY NEW YEAR WORLD! 2010 is ripe with promise for fans looking forward to the filming of two Hobbit movies to begin.