Peter Jackson and Weta Digital Go All Out with 'Hobbit' Finale

"The Hobbit" finale is bracketed by the dragon Smaug's destruction of Laketown and the eponymous series of battles that occur on multiple fronts and take up the entire third act. For Laketown, Weta Digital ran all the buildings through different levels of destruction. It was like dropping a ball on them and letting them get crushed. Weta used the in-house fire simulation engine called Odin and then ran it through Synapse, the software for volumetric effects. Then they tied in the flame effects during the destruction.  "The flame thrower effect from [Smaug's] breath was hard," says Letteri, the four-time Oscar winner and Weta's senior VFX supervisor, who has both "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes" and "The Battle of the Five Armies" in contention for the VFX Oscar. "He's traveling at supersonic speeds so you have to do tricks at simulating the flame at realistic speed and then figure out »