Artists can use familiar grooming tools - brushes, combs, scissors, blow-dryers – as well as purely digital tools such as bending, clumping, and frizzing. The average human head has over 100,000 hairs, and Wig lets the artists edit every single one directly. None of the hair is simulated; it's all directly controlled by the artist. Once the groom is done, Wig lets us render the hair in full detail.
Artists can use Wig to create and groom any kind of hair or fur. For a single character, an artist might create grooms for the hairstyle, eyebrows, a moustache, and chest hair. Wig edits it all – as well as the body fur on the character's dog. Wig's functions are so flexible that it's been used for some unexpected purposes – for example, creating the “peach fuzz” effect on a velvet jacket. Wig is a core part of Weta's creature pipeline. In 2015, it won a Scientific/Technical Oscar.
Technical Achievement Awards are presented to Marco Revelant for the original concepts and artistic vision, and to Alasdair Coull and Shane Cooper for the original architectural and engineering design, of the Barbershop hair grooming system at Weta Digital.
Some of the most stunning recent digital hair and fur work on film - think Caesar, Maurice and hundreds of apes in the new Planet of the Apes films, Middle-earth creatures from the Hobbit trilogy, Snowy in Tintin - has come out of Weta Digital.
Scientific and Technical Award
To Marco Revelant for the original concepts and artistic vision, and to Alasdair Coull and Shane Cooper for the original architectural and engineering design, of the Barbershop hair grooming system at Weta Digital.