Avatar: The Way of Water’s CGI is a huge leap forward for film effects

When James Cameron’s Avatar came out back in 2009, it was one of the most visually ambitious movies that audiences had ever seen. The legendary director has always pushed boundaries with his storytelling, but with Avatar‘s detailed 3D presentation, numerous motion-capture animated characters, and breathtaking alien vistas and creatures, it was one of the most innovate films of the 2000s.

Fast forward to 2022, and we’re finally getting the first of Cameron’s long-awaited Avatar sequels. The first trailer for Avatar: The Way of Water released earlier this year, teasing a return to Pandora with Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), and their Na’vi and human children. This movie has been more than a decade in the making, and from the sweeping visuals of the trailer, it seems like the wait will have been worth it.

Avatar: The Way of Water has a ton of newly developed visual technology

However, the Internet being what it is, there are contingents that have taken to griping that the visual effects don’t look that impressive compared to all the other stunning movies we’ve seen since Avatar. In a recent episode of “VFX Artists React” on the Corridor Crew YouTube channel (via Screen Rant), a group of special effects artists went into detail about how revolutionary some of Avatar: The Way of Water’s special effects are, even just in the trailer. And it all comes down to the water.

The specific moment they picked out is this one, where we see a close-up of a Na’vi cinching the straps of their aquatic mount’s saddle as water laps at their hand. According to the artists, this entire shot was made with CGI effects, which is crazy considering how realistic it looks.

Here’s what the Corridor Crew had to say about it:

"Ian Hubert: “The bit that I think is nuts is the surface tension in the bottom left, the way it goes into that woven bit. I don’t remember ever seeing surface tension on that complex and dynamic of a scale. As the water goes away it’s still trapped there in the little bits [of woven fabric].”Sam Gorski: “On top of that, from a visual and rendering standpoint, I don’t even know how many patents they’ve been making. But I’ve seen little blurbs pop that’s like, ‘Oh, cool, Weta’s got like 4 or 5 new water simulations patents,’ for really unique cases like this shot.”Wren Weichman: “I think there’s a two-stage water simulation happening here. Normally, when you do a water sim it’s very particle-based and they’re doing that first particle sim for the water. But then, when it actually interfaces with something I think what [the new patent’s] saying is it’s actually generating new particles at those actual surfaces and that’s kind of creating the illusion of that water tension that you’re talking about.[…] Weta is famous for literally inventing tools from scratch to make their movies.”"

Weichman is absolutely right about Wētā FX (formerly called Weta Digital) having a reputation for innovating new tools for its films, from the extensive technology used to create Gollum and the replicated CGI armies in The Lord of the Rings to the even more detailed performance capture tech used to bring Caesar to life in the Planet of the Apes trilogy. Wētā FX is one of the most well known companies in the special effects business for a reason, and Avatar: The Way of Water is just going to drive that home even further.

All of this also lines up well with something Zoe Saldaña said a while back: part of the reason it’s taken Cameron so long to finish Avatar 2 is that his team has needed to literally create the technology that would make the physics of the film’s extensive underwater sequences work. We’re just getting the barest hint of that in the trailer, but it’s already enough to show that the effects on this thing are going to be revolutionary.

Avatar: The Way of Water splashes into theaters on December 16.

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