Анимированный Форекс Аватар

James Cameron’s Avatar follows the journey of Jake Sully, a paraplegic marine who is dispatched to the moon Pandora on a unique mission.

Mark Wilson, Gizmodo

Avatar: The Way of Water continues to smash box office records right and left, immersing audiences around the globe in an imaginative world unlike any they’ve experienced before. Directed by James Cameron, with cinematography by

Russell Carpenter, and visual effects created by a small army of immensely talented artists, the film continues the story of the Sully family (Jake, Neytiri and their kids), depicting the trouble that follows them, the lengths they go to keep each other safe, the battles they fight, and the tragedies they endure.

In achieving new heights in visual and narrative achievement, director Cameron was supported by New Zealand’s Oscar-winning visual effects powerhouse Wētā FX, who were also instrumental in the success of the first Avatar film. Among those lending his skills to the enterprise was Senior Animation Supervisor Dan Barrett, who, along with Senior Visual Effects Supervisor Joe Letteri and the other dedicated members of Wētā’s gifted team, ensured the verisimilitude of both the characters and the many complex components comprising the Na’vis’ watery world.

We spoke with the two-time VES Award-winning and four-time Oscar-nominated Barrett (he's also won two Annie Awards and received 4 BAFTA nominations) about his collaboration with Cameron, and about the commitment and attention to detail that continues to define Wētā’s world-class work.

AWN: It seems to me that, more than on most films, there was an incredible amount of what I'll call “prep work” that went into The Way of Water. It seems like very little was left to chance, and the visual effects folks had an easier time than they sometimes do because they weren’t searching around in the dark for direction. Did you find that you had more to work with, and that you could really focus on executing, rather than having to figure stuff out first?

Dan Barrett: The kind of work that I enjoy doing is bringing out little details, especially compelling emotional performances. And what I personally find difficult is working on things that don't end up on screen. That’s something that happens, whatever department you're in, but on certain films it happens a lot more than others. Jim Cameron wants every cent of the budget that he has, or as much of that as possible, to end up on screen. So he spends money and time and energy at the right time in the process – whether it's making sure the script's completely nailed down, working out what the shots are going to look like, preparing for the live-action shoot, making sure that all of the builds associated with that match, and ensuring that the motion-capture shoot is going to match the environment. All these decisions being made at the right time gives us the time that we need to do our job, which is putting all of that detail in there to make those compelling and believable worlds and compelling and believable performances.

AWN:As digital character performances get better, people not in the know tend to think it's a lot easier than it is, and they tend to think it's just motion-capture from an actor in a suit. But even if you produce a good looking photoreal image, as soon as you have to make it move with emotion, that's where an incredible amount of difficulty still comes in. Can you talk about how you use the motion-capture data and what your animation process actually entails?

DB: Our new system gives us better than a 90% blocking of the facial performance, but there’s always stuff to be done beyond that by the animator’s hand. It's what the audience feels when they see a face. And those little subtleties tend to be the bits that are (a) most important, and (b) less likely to be picked up by the technology. So that's where the animator is, guiding that last five to 10% of detail in the faces to make sure that it's all there.

There are two ways of looking at a shot. You can look at all of the details, what's moving on the face. The other way is where you just have to clear your mind of all that and you just have to sit back and you have to let it wash over you. You just sit there as a human and look at the performance. What do I feel? And then you do the same with the CG version. Do I feel the same thing? And when you don't, you know you're not quite there.

AWN:Are the eyes the most difficult thing to get right, or are there other parts of the face that are equally or more challenging?

DB: As far as eyes, as long as you've got a rig that does the job, that moves sympathetically – like if the skin surrounding the eyes moves correctly and sympathetically with eye movement – that’s a great starting point. I've always said that eye animation is the most important thing on a face and the easiest thing on a face. You just need to observe and make sure you do what you have to.

I think one of the trickiest things from an animation perspective is the mouth. It's an orbital muscle that's incredibly dexterous. It can move in all sorts of ways. And you really don't want to lose people on that. You want people to believe that the words that they're hearing are the words that are coming out of the mouth of the character. So I think that's really an important part.

AWN: How big of a team did you have doing the animation that you were supervising?

DB: I think that we were about strong just for the animation team. That includes various departments. We had a special facial department led by Stuart Adcock, and we had a special motion-edit department that dealt just with captured performance. They're not going to do creatures, they're not going to be keyframing from scratch – which isn't to say that they don't animate, but their starting point tends to be performance-capture. This entire animation team handled the characters and creatures.

AWN:Were there any unexpected challenges for you and the team on this film?

DB: It's a good question because you do endeavor not to have unexpected challenges when working on a Jim Cameron film. You like to think you've thought about everything in advance. I can't really think of any unexpected challenges, but there were certain things that we knew were coming that we had to learn along the way. One of the things that required a new way of working was the water. For example, we knew we had to animate a whole lot of boats, and we knew that the terrain that we were going to be animating these boats on was going to be liquid and we knew that that would change. Maybe a boat came past and there was a simulation that then upset a wave crest. Or, more commonly, you would have situations where you would be asked to change the wave phase. And so, all of a sudden, all of the work you'd done was gone because you just changed the terrain you'd been working on. We did a lot of development there on building rigs for animators that included elements of simulation.

So, you drive it in that direction. You put it at the speed, it shows you what it's going to do as it goes over these waves. And, obviously, the motion's different if it's going towards the wave, as opposed to with the wave. So there were some big challenges there. But as we went, we learned and we improved those tools.

AWN:What did you learn on this film that's going to serve you on the next work that you do?

DB: I'm an animation supervisor, but I think I'm a stronger filmmaker now for having worked with Jim, because he's such an interesting and generous guy to work with. He shares information, he tells you what he wants, and he tells you why he's doing these things. It's sensible because he wants to empower those around him to get ahead of those decisions, to understand the way he makes film, so that you don't need to be told down the track. If you see something happening, you can make suggestions or you can change things or suggest things. So you tend to learn a lot. I think I've probably learned more over the last few years working with Jim than I have in the rest of my career.

Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.

Wētā FX’s largest-ever VFX undertaking

The Kendo UI FX (Effects) instances provide a rich, extensible, and performance-optimized toolset for element transitions.

Kendo UI supports the following effects:

The FX is part of Kendo UI for jQuery, a professional grade UI library with + components for building modern and feature-rich applications. To try it out sign up for a free day trial.

Download Free Trial

Whenever possible, effects are hardware-accelerated through CSS transitions which makes them ideal for desktop and mobile devices. Unlike the CPU intensive JavaScript animations, animations that are implemented with CSS provide better frame rates and battery life. To show and hide certain parts of the user interface (UI), you can also play animations in reverse. For chaining and callbacks, the Kendo UI FX utilizes the jQuery Deferred utility.

Initializing FX Instances

To create the FX instances, use the jQuery selector wrapper. To create multiple effects, you can also use a single wrapper.

You can compress the code from the previous example to a single line.

Functionality and Features

See Also

Cet article est disponible en: Anglais

Cette nuit se tenait à Hollywood la 95ème cérémonie des Oscars, qui a couvert de sept statuettes le film Everything Everywhere All at Once, dont celle du meilleur film.

Du côté de l’animation et des effets visuels, voici le palmarès.

Avatar 2 domine les effets visuels

Il s’agit sans doute d’une des récompenses les moins surprenantes des Oscars : Avatar : la voie de l’eau remporte l’Oscar des meilleurs effets visuels, devant Top Gun: Maverick, A L’Ouest Rien de nouveau, The Batman, Black Panther : Wakanda Forever.

Si l’Académie a toujours eu un faible pour les effets impliquant des créatures, c’est clairement le niveau de l’ensemble des effets du film qui méritait le prix, et notamment l’incroyable travail réalisé sur les simulations d’eau.

Peu après avoir reçu le prix, Joe Letteri, Richard Baneham, Eric Saindon et Daniel Barrett ont répondu à la presse :

Pinocchio : la stop-motion devant l’animation 3D

Pinocchio par Guillermo del Toro a réussi à conquérir pour ces Oscars le coeur de l’Académie dans une catégorie historiquement dominée par les studios Disney-Pixar.
Guillermo del Toro a profité de son discours pour souligner que « l’animation n’est pas un genre, une catégorie à part », mais tout simplement du cinéma.
De quoi, une fois de plus, s’interroger sur l’intérêt d’une catégorie spécifique pour l’animation : certaines personnes avancent que cela empêche de fait les films d’animation de gagner l’Oscar du meilleur film. Le débat est également récurrent autour de ce qui constitue un film d’animation : en , l’Académie avait changé son règlement pour préciser que « la motion capture n’est pas une technique d’animation », et pour préciser les critères permettant à un film de concourir dans cette catégorie. Une évolution que beaucoup considéraient comme un impact direct de la sortie d’Avatar et du questionnement autour du statut des films comportant finalement plus d’images générées par ordinateur que d’éléments réels.

Voici là encore les réactions de l’équipe dans la salle de presse :

Le très drôle Alerte Rouge des studios Pixar, l’aventure maritime Le Monstre des Mers de Sony Pictures Imageworks (visible sur Netflix), le très touchant Marcel The Shell with Shoes On (dont nous vous reparlerons), la folie visuelle du film Le Chat Potté 2 : La Dernière Quête de DreamWorks n’auront donc pas su vaincre le conte proposé par Guillermo del Toro et Mark Gustafson.

On doit évidemment le succès de Pinocchio au travail admirable de réalisation, mais aussi au soin apporté à la fois dans l’animation en stop-motion et les effets visuels qui sont venus la sublimer ou la compléter.
Nous vous avions d’ailleurs proposé une interview centrée sur les effets signés MPC : le studio a géré eau et feu, le ciel, des environnements qu’il aurait été difficiles de mettre en place en stop-motion, et a aussi nettoyé en partie les artefacts issus de la stop-motion.

Voici également notre interview en compagnie de l’équipe d’un autre projet nommé hier soir : Le Chat Potté 2.

Meilleur court-métrage d’animation : L’enfant, la taupe, le renard et le cheval

Enfin, du côté des courts-métrages d’animation, c’est L’enfant, la taupe, le renard et le cheval de Peter Baynton et Charlie Mackesy qui repart avec un prix.

Adapté du livre de Charlie Mackesy, le court nous vient de NoneMore et Bar Robot Productions. Voici sa bande-annonce :

Voici les réactions de l’équipe du court-métrage dans la salle de presse :

Les autres nommés dans la même catégorie pour ces Oscars étaient :

• The Flying Sailor
• Ice Merchants
• My Year of Dicks
• An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It

On trouvera sur le site des Oscars la liste complète des prix décernés.

You can create complex animated transitions between two elements within a common container by using the effect.

Unlike the other available effects, relies on CSS classes to define the transition states of the two elements. The effect works only in browsers which support transitions.

Getting Started

The configuration works in the following way:

1. The effect assigns several CSS classes to a common container based on the effect configuration. For example, if the effect is configured as , the assigned classes are (always assigned), (the transition class), and . If the effect is to be played in reverse, assign an additional class.
2. The effect element receives the CSS class.
3. The element which is going to be hidden receives the CSS class.
4. The container gets the CSS class, which is then replaced by .
5. In and , the and CSS selectors have their transition CSS property set to . As a result, both elements transition their state from the one defined in the to the one defined in .

The following example demonstrates how to apply the Kendo UI effect.

Customizing the Transition Duration

The duration of the animated transition is configured through the CSS selectors which are present in .

You can override the default duration for the entire document by using a higher specificity selector or by including the same selector after Kendo UI stylesheet references.

The following example demonstrates how to apply a faster effect transition.

You can use this technique to customize the Kendo UI Mobile view transitions.

Animating Nested Elements

In addition to the two elements themselves, the contents of the elements can also perform additional transitions. You can use this approach to implement the complex iOS transition in the Kendo UI hybrid widgets. The cross-browser definitions are omitted from the source.

The following example demonstrates the Kendo UI multi-element iOS transition.

See Also