How ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ VFX Team Created Water Simulations

How ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ VFX Team Created Water Simulations

"Avatar: Fire and Ash" visual effects team on creating the water simulations.

Richard Baneham and Eric Saindon on the ‘Never Easy’ Visual Effects of ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’

James Cameron’s “Avatar: Fire and Ash” is one of the most ambitious visual effects films ever made, a movie that used over 140 petabytes (140,000 terabytes) of disk space and employed well over a thousand personnel assigned to the effects. In a 197-minute movie, there are only 11 shots — around seven seconds of film — that don’t include any visual effects. For executive producer and visual effects supervisor Richard Baneham, tackling a project o…