Slashdot Mirror

5 years to fake a tape !!!!
shoulda got weta digital to do it

C'mon. Jackson loves all the movies with monsters/giant apes/ugly orcs/lots of blood Look at his filmography. He loves to scare. And this 'giant ape' movie is The Scary Movie All-time Classic.
Besides with the props and CG effects fromWETA this will be masterpiece. I can't wait.

A variety of the New Zealand weta (a cool cricket for which the LotR FX studio is named), has developed special proteins that enable it to survive through harsh alpine winters in a sort of hibernation with up to 80% of its body water frozen.

Actually, WETA FX itself likes to write it in all caps. Perhaps to differentiate itself from the bug.

The weta is unique to New Zealand, much as is the kiwi bird. Perhaps New Zealanders feel the same sort of affection towards the bug as they do towards the bird.

I have a friend who just got hired there to work on their motion-capture team. I'll ask him why they named it that and whether or not caps should be used.

WETA is a public television station in DC. Weta is where this guy works.

Sometimes people go too far in being a fan of a great movie or of a great book.

Meh. The true freaks (or at least, the dedicated and skilled ones) work at the Weta Workshop, who was in charge of making every prop in the movie series.

Some of the work that is shown on the Special Extended DVD Edition is truly amazing.

A more doable approach to getting into 3D animation software design would be to design something to complement an existing program.

For example Weta designed an AI program to create the hordes of characters in the battle scenes of LOTR. Their program (plug-in?) worked with Maya (the industry standard)and far surpasses previous attempts. Compare the armies in LOTR to the robot army in Star Wars. If you look real close at Star Wars you can see multiple robots that are duplicates but in LOTR every character in the army behaves independently because they are all AI.

This guy could work on something like that which would improve on the allready impressive Maya. Or you could just contribute to an open source project...

Weta, the graphics power house behind Peter Jackson, have recently purchased NZ Herald: "[476 systems] at 2.2GHz with four gigabytes of memory each. The 950 processors will be added to 350 existing 1GHz Pentium 3 systems as part of a dedicated "render wall" comprising 22 racks." These will be running Renderman software on RedHat. For all those army sceens in LOTR, Grunt (Guaranteed Rendering of Unlimited Numbers of Things) was used, an in house product by Jon Allitt.

I recall an article on WETA. Don't know about the entire rendering process, but they created a program called Massive - it allows each individual character to interact with the environment while still moving with others, i.e. soldiers shifting their weight over unever terrain while still marching.

They are also using Shake from Nothing Real for compositing. Not sure about anything else they use, though.

See their website.

I used to live in Wellington, New Zealand. And that's a nice city - but small, only 400K.

I wouldn't say it's incredible, but Wellington's been getting easier to live in in the last couple of years since Saturn's covered most of it with a decent cable network.

Also I think WETA has been taking on some people since they began work on all the Lord of the Rings movie effects. You'd normally have to be really well qualified and slightly lucky to get into it though.

FOr normal IT industry stuff I'd have to agree. I know a lot of people in NZ who've migrated to Australia for interesting IT work, and Melbourne seems to be quite popular.