No doubt one of the best features in Avatar was the planet Pandora itself, with the lush terrain and beautiful junglescapes. Weta talks on CGSociety about how they created the forest, and reveals that it was a largely procedural design using simulated plant and forest growth algorithms with the popular large-scale asset management tool Massive.
Allitt wrote a system that allowed Weta’s artists to plant (programming) seeds in Massive that accomplished this, as explained by VFX Supervisor Eric Saindon. “It was very interesting. You could actually watch a forest grow in real time with this solution, and any TD could grow just by painting colors on the terrain.” With this elegant solution, the big trees would grow first, then the smaller trees would die off as the big trees took away the light, the smaller trees would fight for position, the ground cover would fill in where it could get light.” This offered the ability to have variants built in easily by simply changing the random number seed, a programming term that means when you do a random call, there is a number you can pass through to offset the results.
And the individual plants, once the simulations were complete, were of startling detail:
The plants also had to have the resolution to hold up at any distance and all plants had to hold up in the foreground. The simplest plant had on the order of 1,000 to 5,000 polygons, relatively low resolution. The average plant was closer to 20 to 100,000 poly range, but some of the high resolutions plants, one called “fernRekA” that looked like a fern whose leaves hadn’t unfurled yet, had 1.2 million polygons. Each leaf was modeled.
via CGSociety – Avatar.
