Tech Term of the Week #6: Special: The tech behind AVATAR at 8:38 PM

So this Friday I went to see Avatar. AND. THAT. MOVIE. IS. FUCKING. AWESOME. THE ENTIRE TIME MY MIND WAS BEING CONTINUALLY BLOWN AWAY. So during the movie, Josh Goldberg stupidly comments, "HOW THEY HELL DO THEY DO THAT?!?!?!?!?" Well in this very special post, im going to explain some of the awesomeness that went into James Cameron's Avatar.



First up we decided to bite the bullet and pay the premium price to watch the movie in 3D. 3D has usually been a gimmick to drive little kids to go watch theses movies but I have to say, The 3D in Avatar is very spectacular. Now 3D in movies is actually 2 flat images both shifted slightly to the right and the left. These images are projected at the same time on the same screen and that is why when you take off your glasses, the image seems fuzzy. Now the objective is for your right and left eyes to see the respective images separately. This used to be done by shifting the hues of the two videos. To filter out the images you would have to wear the glasses we all come to associate with 3D.

GLASSES!!!!







The colored lens filter out the colors for each eye. The blue lens will only let blue light through and the red only lets red. So if you make what you want the left eye to see red, and the right, blue. This makes your eyes see two separate images. Your brain interprets this as depth and starts thinking in 3D.
Another way to do this (the modern way) is to use polarized lens. This little graphic helps explain polarized lens very nicely

So if you can think of polarized lens as a lens with slits in it. If the slits are vertical they only let in light that is vertically moving


if the slits are horizontal, only horizontal light gets through


and last if u have both of them no light gets through, but why would you want that?



so the same concept of having two images that are slightly shifted, but this time instead of offsetting the hue, they are projected using two different types of light. The lenses on the glasses only let in the specific image and again it fools your brain into thinking in 3D

Avatar had the most detailed environments I have ever seen in a film to date. Every scene had detailed plants and animals which translated to a believable planet.

If you go back and read my post on graphics cards, you can find out how they actually made all the models. But I just wanted to point out the massive scale of this movie. EVERYTHING in this movie had to be made using those steps. An animator had to make the wireframe, texturize it, and animate it. That means every tree, every plant, every animal, every leaf that falls, all the land, all the airplanes, EVERYTHING. Just makes you appreciate the scenic vistas that the movie threw at you every 10 minutes.

Another thing was the way Avatar was filmed. Cameron was testing a new "virtual camera" system. In past films the 3D environments were added after the filming finished. But using the new system, Cameron was able to see in real time how the actors were interacting with the environment. Another major innovation was the realistic motion capture. The actors were put into normal motion capture suits, but in addition, they wore a camera head rig. It filmed the actors facial expressions so that they could be realistically mapped onto the 3D models. As a result Avatar had some of the most realistic characters in a long time.

Avatar was a technical marvel of film. It sets the bar for how sci fi movies should look. The panoramic landscapes and massive landmarks define how an alien planet should look.