Concept Overdrive, the company that developed much of the special camera and tracking hardware used by James Cameron for Avatar, has just released a new press release detailing much of the technology. IT discusses the Overdrive motion management system, “Synthesis” render pipeline, and Virtual Camera and Camera Wheels applications.
The Virtual Camera, which is prominent in Avatar publicity, contains a Concept Overdrive microcontroller which handles analog and digital inputs, sending them through an Overdrive system to be streamed into the 3D computer graphics world. A camera-wheels device was also developed with an internal embedded Overdrive computer; this was fed into the CG world and used for dolly shots with frame-accurate sync. Nearly every CG shot of the film flowed through Overdrive computers and protocols at some point.
“Being a deterministic hard real time system, the Overdrive boxes were the only computers on set that could gen-lock to camera shutter and time code.” Rosenbluth says, “On some shots there were four of our systems running in parallel, it was awesome to see it all happening. On-set users had no idea of how much data was flying around the room, they just took for granted that they could get the shot – which is how it should be.” Concept Overdrive systems ran unattended for months at a time.
via Avatar’s Special Effects Enhanced by Overdrive Technology.
