Avatar, with its unique CG production challenges associated with characters and environments and stereoscopic 3-D, laid the foundation for the formation of the Weta Digital R&D unit.

BD: What are some of the problems you are looking to solve more directly?

JL: Generally, the problems are the ones we've all been looking at. On the simulation side, it's still water, fluid, cloth. It's all those sorts of things that people have been cracking and been getting better and better at, but every time you solve one problem, you realize there's a whole class you haven't looked at yet: different types of materials that you might want to get into. The things that are hard continue to be hard, so we're trying to make them easier and get into these others things we haven't touched yet. Similarly, with the rendering side, speaking of big data sets, you go from putting one character in a plate to having to do the whole world. That has its own set of challenges so you're looking at the things that work on a small scale to now being able to scale that up with larger groups of characters and creatures. Big lighting environments; global illumination types of solutions. Things that will actually work for creating an integrated world.

The realtime side of it is interesting to us because it's always been kind of out there but nothing you could bring to bear fully in production… so we're wondering where we can take advantage of those engines and try to figure out a hybrid approach: how to take the most appropriate data and loop it through graphics hardware and bring it back into the pipeline. That has both a research and engineering side to make it work.

BD: What has been the impact of Avatar and now Tintin on where you're headed technologically?

JL: That's what's laid the foundation for all of this. It was really just a question of saying, if we're really going to be doing all of this and there's so much we're going to be learning, we need some way to manage it: there needs to be some group responsible for looking at all of this information, making sure that things we learn in one area apply to another area and just generally pull it all together and what we do learn continues to evolve.

But it's built on a pretty strong foundation: the last couple of years have been pretty good for us in terms of research and just going back to basics, trying to evaluate all the assumptions we've been dealing with the past 10 or 15 years and in a sense just starting all over again.

BD: You're really on the cutting of edge of a new paradigm of moviemaking with performance capture and stereoscopic 3-D.

JL: There are two things that really change: One is character, which I alluded to before. Rather than just having a few hero characters in a scene, now you've got to populate the whole world. And it has to be just as believable. It's not good enough to have characters in the background who aren't speaking and aren't articulating. It all has to look as good as the people in front. How do you take what you're learning about facial animation for your hero characters and apply that to background characters without having to do the steps of building each one to the level of hand-crafted detail. The fact that you have to [digitally] build all of these sets now [is another challenge]. Doing a whole sandy floor that people have to walk on, for example, is still really hard to do in computer graphics; getting all the character interaction with all those particles is a huge problem. But where you can still get this nice, organic, dirty kind of feeling easily in the real world is still hard to do. But it's background, so it can't be a big deal.

BD: And stereoscopic must be posing a lot of detail-oriented challenges because you can't really cheat anymore.

JL: That was a big part of the impetus. You're right: you can't cheat a lot anymore. Not that using elements in miniatures, for instance, is completely out of the question, they can still be made to work. But your last minute cheats no longer work. You really have to think hard about it to make it all integrate properly by the time you hit the final render button.

For those interested in a research position at Weta Digital, you can contact them at: http://www.wetafx.co.nz/jobs/.

Bill Desowitz is senior editor of AWN and VFXWorld.