Avatar was revolutionary. It was legendary. At my hometown of Kolkata alone, it made all the multiplexes to upgrade to 3-D vision glasses and facilitated the opening of many iMax theaters at unexpected locations across the country. But in-spite of all the commercial advertisement, there are some facts related to Avatar which went unheard.
Did you all know, Avatar used graphics designed by a four time Academy Award winning visual effects facility based at New Zealand. It has done graphics for X-Men, did it for I Robot and now, it has also done it for Avatar.
To my surprise, the company uses all non-windows software to achieve all these cutting edge graphics. The systems used to render these graphics were all using RHEL as their OS and were all HP Blade server clusters. All these systems are 64 bit and the cluster at Weta Digital is one of the world’s largest Linux clusters. It is ranked #193 amongst the top 500 supercomputers of the world with processing capabilities of 10 Gigaflops.
It is great to know that most of the software used to render these graphics were all Linux software like SoftImage, CompTime, Cine-Paint etc.
Weta Digital has won four Academy Awards and BAFTAs. Did you see the movie Avatar? If you liked it, you can also check the Avatar Windows 7 theme.