The VFX in Avatar: The Way of Water is all new

After 13 years, moviegoers have returned to Pandora because Avatar: The Way of Water is now in theaters. However, for the VFX animators behind the film, it wasn’t just a matter of “going back” to the Pandora that had been created for James Cameron’s 2009 original film. As supervisors and animators told SYFY WIRE, every aspect of the film — even the parts that seem like they could have just been reused from the first Avatar — had to be totally rebuilt for The Way of Water.

“Everything is new since the first film. The models are new, the shaders are new, everything is new,” Dan Barrett, The Way of Water’s senior animation supervisor, explained during a VFX press junket on the Disney lot before the film’s premiere. “We've got our guidebook in terms of the first film, in terms of the way light responds with them, the way the shaders work, the way the face moves, these things have all advanced.”
Anything you see in The Way of Water might have been inspired or based on imagery, techniques, and digital assets from the first movie, but none of it was directly ported over. There are a few scenes, Barrett said, that are basically shots from the first film. (Barret didn’t specify, but the “footage” that the Recombinant Quaritch watches of his human self’s death could, perhaps, be one example.)


Jim would be like, ‘Why can't you just reinstate that from the first film?’” Barret recalled. “And that's just not something we could do. None of it worked with our pipeline. None of it worked with our assets. There was nothing we could do. We just had to rebuild those shots and make them look like the first film only, you know, better.”

Indeed, while the first Avatar was groundbreaking on a technological level, CGI and filmmaking techniques have progressed in the decade since that film. For instance, the system the animators used to create Jake Sully, Neytiri, and the other Na’vi’s faces in the ‘09 film was “surface level” compared to the new technique that goes under the digital skin with “170-odd muscle strains within the face.”