TheOneRing.net: Tales from the Two Towers: Victoria U Report. "Weta Workshop deal specifically with the models, props and miniatures – all the physical things. Weta Digital on the other hand, work with the virtual - all the 3D characters, Motion Capture and Special effects.

All the film first comes to WD and is scanned into the computer system through the use of one of two Imagica Film Scanners. These scanners can scan at 3.2 mega pixels at an amazing 64 billion colours. The speed of this is about 4.5 frames/second. The data is then fed to the storage facility along a 4 gigabit Ethernet.

The renderer alone is run 24 hours a day rendering out the 1000 odd shots that were required for TTT. It consists of 192 Dual Pentium 1 GHz and 448 Dual 2.2 GHz processors. A total of 1280 processors running at approximately 2,355 GHz.

In fact so much data is scanned in that it would be next to impossible to use it all so the mesh is then converted to a NURBS model, which smoothes most of it out. The detail that was lost is still kept and the difference between the NURBS model and the original scan is uses as a displacement map (A texture that applies bumps based on a greyscale image).

Most prominently Maya was used for the modelling and animation, Pixars Renderman was used for the rendering and finally Apple’s Shake was used for compositing the film.

The developer of Massive is under talks at the moment to release Massive commercially."