Meanwhile, the 1/24 scale sculpture also served as the basis for the CG Godzilla model. Despite the filmmakers' paranoia that their re-styled star would surface on the web or in print prior to Godzilla's theatrical release, they allowed Tatopoulos to fly a disassembled casting of the creature to Utah where it was cyberscanned and reconstructed by senior digital sculptor Steven Keele at Viewpoint DataLabs International, Inc. for use in the digital realm.
CFX selected Viewpoint for the project because of the two companies’ prior success in collaborating on ID4, for which Viewpoint created 3-D models of the alien attack ships and the defending F-18 fighter planes. For Godzilla, they would be called on to help create not only the film’s titanic star, but intricately detailed CG versions of it’s numerous offspring, dubbed the Baby ’Zillas, as well as photorealistic 3-D models of the Brooklyn Bridge and a NYC taxi cab, both of which had to precisely match and intercut with physical miniatures created for the film. In all, this would take a full year of work by the Viewpoint modeling team. In addition, CFX licensed a Viewpoint Platinum library for use in the film, which supplied the filmmakers with over 4,500 pre-built 3-D computer models to be used as props and set elements throughout the film.
Digitizing the physical sculpture of Godzilla was performed by a team of 10 Viewpoint modelers, each of whom was assigned different parts of the creature. The process itself, which required making several CG wire-frame versions of the beast using digitizing arms, SGI and Pentium-based workstations, and several software modeling tool (including Softimage/3D, Alias/Wavefront, Nichimen), was accomplished in just three months, while it generally takes two to three months to build each version.
The highest-resolution nurbs version of the model contained 166,890 control vertices and 3.08MB of geometry (not including textures or inverse kinematics data); when translated during the rendering process, it had over one million triangles. The highest-resolution polygonal version of the model totaled over 5000,000 polygons.
Ultimately, it was Engle's job to seamlessly combine the models, the man-in-a-suit, the hydraulic creature and CG elements with the actors and actual buildings into realistic scenes. Aiding him in this task was the use of Avid’s Film Composer digital editing system. CFX first scanned all of their storyboards, loaded them into the Composer, and then created rough animatics to illustrate for artists and studio executives alike exactly what was required for the complex effects sequences in terms of scale, shot count and shot duration.This previsualization method also helped director of photography Ueli Steiger frame specific shots and understand where to place live actors who would be interacting with computer-generated characters.
While CFX's animators, working under former ID4 CG Supervisors Steeffen Wild and Carolin Quis, had yet to lick the new Godzilla's overall movements in the computer, they had achieved some remarkable results with Godzilla's feet and tail. Making the foot of a 200' creature move convincingly in closeup, with the appropriate jiggle and spread as all its weight settles on it, was a long and involved process that began with the first teaser. "Steeffen Wild and Carolin Quis, our first animators on the show, figured out the deformation of the foot by putting their hand down on the table and seeing what happened with the flesh," Engle says. "In the beginning, it was too exaggerated. It looked like a foot-shaped balloon, so we made it way more subtle. To create the proper sense of weight, our compositing supervisors, Connie Fauser and Mitch Drain had to apply all these little tricks, like water splash elements around the foot when it comes down into the street, cracks in the pavement and debris spritzing up. Connie is the young woman who did all of our beloved main composite shots on Independence Day, and she established the effect of Godzilla's foot coming down by attaching this subtle camera shake to it in post-, which was really helpful in selling the enormous weight."
But as production wrapped and the practical dust and debris dissipated, two things were becoming clear: Emmerich and Devlin weren't satisfied with most of the 1/6 and 1/24 scale Godzilla and CFX was way behind on their animation shots. Most alarming, however, was the fact that motion capture, the technique the filmmakers had counted on to relieve pressure from their start-up facility and to bring their effects-heavy epic in on-time and on-budget, wasn't working. The idea was for an actor, wearing a Bodyglove suit dotted with registration points at every joint, to mime Godzilla's actions in front of six cameras strategically positioned on the floor, ceiling and sides to capture his movements in 3-D space on VisionArt's dedicated stage. Visionart's animators would then translate this data to the computer generated Godzilla. Thus, in theory, Emmerich could direct Godzilla's "performance" in real time, while saving a bundle on CG animation.
But in practice, it turns out motion capture wasn't the best technique for animating a creature that was no longer anthropomorphic. Ironically, the results were virtually the '90s equivalent of a man-in-a-suit, the flip side of the original '50s Godzilla technology, achieved at more expense with greater effort. Where all the Army's weapons and the National Guard failed, motion capture nearly succeeded in destroying Godzilla. "The shots didn't turn out the way we wanted to because the motion was always human," Engle explains. "We could never get away from the man-in-suit look. We realized we were better off using keyframe animation from the beginning so we didn't have to deal with the human spine and we could give it more lizardlike movements."
"Ultimately, it was decided for aesthetic and personal reasons not to go with motion capture," adds VisionArt's head, Josh Rose. "I was disappointed because we had a lot of investment in the system and we felt the system was ready. We designed our system as a director friendly tool, but it did not work for Roland in that way."
"There wasn't a chance in hell that motion capture was going to work," insists associate visual effects supervisor Karen Goulekas (The Fifth Element), who joined CFX in December, 1997. "Visionart's motion capture set-up was the best I've ever seen, but a man can't move like a lizard and cleaning up the resulting spike data was more difficult than just animating Godzilla using keyframes." It was Goulekas who ultimately convinced Emmerich to pull the plug on Visionart's motion capture approach, a tough decision since the effects house had literally rescued ID4.
But there was no time to worry about stepping on toes. Goulekas immediately began breaking down every effect into model, live-action and CG elements, then estimated the total number of manweeks per shot. What she learned horrified her: "Centropolis was a complete start-up. Nobody knew what the breakdowns were, there weren't any video dailies, there were no walk-throughs, there was nothing. And I was thinking, ëOh my God, now I have to build a facility!' After I was there for three weeks, I told Roland and Dean, ëI know you don't know me but I don't think there's a chance in Hell of you delivering this movie on the course you're on. You can't.' I said, ëLook guys, Centropolis isn't ready for this. You don't have enough people. You're going to need 60 or 70 artists.' They said, ëNo way, we did Independence Day with a lot lessÖ' I said, ëIt's a little different with spaceships!' Roland snapped, ëFix it.'"
Fortunately, the day Goulekas joined Godzilla, her previous employer, Digital Domain, laid off 50 artists. "So I was out in the parking lot saying, 'I'm going to Godzilla, call Centropolis!' and now I have almost 30 of those ex-DDers over here."
Foremost among these is DD's ace character animator, Andy Jones, who was actually hired by CFX a month before Goulekas. While others struggled for over a year to replicate Godzilla's swift, graceful movements in CG, Jones deftly nailed the look of Godzilla in keyframing in two months. Jones' reward: Goulekas made him animation supervisor. "Andy has this sense of motion," Goulekas enthuses, "and once he nailed the look, all the other animators fell into place and got the style."
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