Archive notice: This article was originally published on March 1, 2010. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
The nominees for the 2009 film year in the “Best Visual Effects” category include Avatar, Star Trek and District 9. They feature previously unrivalled realistic representations of fantasy and science-fiction worlds, computer-generated using NVIDIA Quadro GPUs. The winner will be announced at the 82nd Academy Awards on March 7 at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood.
New Zealand company Weta Digital played a major role in developing the visual effects for Avatar. Weta Digital has long been an NVIDIA customer and uses both NVIDIA Quadro and Tesla solutions to realise visual effects. The computing power required for the Avatar shots was greater than for any previous Weta project.
“The complexity of Avatar prompted us to rethink rendering,” explains Sebastian Sylwan, head of Research and Development at Weta. “Working with NVIDIA, we found a way to render highly complex scenes in significantly less time. Our designers can now experiment freely with different lighting distributions and perform iterations more quickly.”
Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) in San Francisco had already created the visual effects for six previous Star Trek films. In the current film, the work included the destruction of planets, creation of the starship Enterprise and other spacecraft, and so-called matte paintings – painted parts of film-set scenery.
“This project was the most demanding in our Star Trek history to date,” emphasises Michael DiComo, Digital Production Supervisor at ILM. “Together with NVIDIA, we established a development partnership that allowed us to overcome previous boundaries in visual effects. With NVIDIA Quadro GPUs in our workstations, we succeeded in offering Star Trek fans a perfect science-fiction world.”
Image Engine Design, a film studio based in Vancouver, Canada, handled the design and integration of the visual effects in District 9 – the seamless combination of computer-generated aliens and live-action footage set in Johannesburg, South Africa. The company used around 100 NVIDIA Quadro GPUs in Linux workstations for the work. Visual-effects studio The Embassy Virtual Effects, also based in Vancouver, created the action-packed exo-suit sequences and also used NVIDIA graphics processors.
