With close to two hundred Godzilla animations to go, nearly three times the CG dino shots in The Lost World, Jones' trendsetting animation occurred not a moment too soon. The animators began by blocking out Godzilla's movements using a low res skeleton and a low res envelope, a relatively quick process. Once Emmerich okayed the basic blocking, the animation was transferred to high-res, where the time-consuming secondary animation that would bring the character to life, from mouth motion to tail twitches, was done. Fortunately, CFX's CG supervisor Steeffen Wild wrote some time-saving custom code, which automatically built in some secondary animation. Thus, when Godzilla lifted his foot, his toes were curl; when he turns his head, the skin of his neck was already programmed to undulate believably. "Softimage really opened up to having lots of functions, so Steeffen set up a lot of math expressions in the high-res skeleton and the high-res envelope," Goulekas says. "That way, when Godzilla lifts his foot, for instance, it automatically aimed downward and the toes curled."
Unfortunately, other layers of animation, like muscle rippling under skin, which made the CG dinos of Jurassic Park so malevolently real, are reportedly missing from Godzilla. "That's one of corners we had to cut," Goulekas sighs. "You're not going to see a lot of that. But he's moving pretty fast and he's a lot leaner and meaner."
In fact, Godzilla's speed increased that of CFX's animators, enabling them to churn out more shots, using a shortcut that dates back to the earliest days of cartoon animation: cycles. Cycles are movements that lend themselves to exact repetition ñ like Godzilla running. "We have several run cycles, and sometimes, we'll just plug a hundred mile an hour run right in," Goulekas adds. "Then we'll get it in front of Roland, who'll say, ëOkay, I want him to pause, look at the soldiers, scream then run some more.' Each shot still had to be tailored, but those run cycles gave us a big headstart."
Once Godzilla was animated, finishing him off required lighting and rendering several layers: the beauty pass, including all the craggy texture maps, the wet pass, the reflective blue iridescent highlight pass, plus passes to cast his shadow and his reflection on the wet pavement. But with all those passes, making any last minute adjustments became a Godzilla-sized headache. "After spending all this time rendering the beauty pass and getting the lighting just so, Roland would look at the composite and say, ëHe needs more contrast' or ëBring his highlights up' and we'd find there wouldn't be enough range in the image to do that," Goulekas relates. "So Frederick Sumongas?, another ex-DDer who became our lighting guru, came up with an amazing set-up using pure red, pure green and pure blue lights. When we rendered that, the compositors could use each of those blue, red and green passes like a matte channel, isolating various sections on Godzilla, so they could add colored lights, highlights or adjust the contrast wherever they wanted. Ultimately, it was almost like having a fill, key and backlight pass."
To make Godzilla appear impossibly huge, CFX's artists also covered him with two depth maps extending from tip to tail and from head to toe and graduating from white to black. "Based on this gray scale," Goulekas explains, "we could mix in atmosphere as he's going up higher within the buildings."
But after taking on the backbreaking load of animating almost all the Godzilla shots, CFX couldn't handle any additional effects work and deliver their shots on time. That's when Sony Pictures Imageworks stepped in, relieving CFX of lighting, rendering and adding interactive Godzilla effects cracking pavement, crumbling buildings to the tune of 103 shots. "Centropolis had to take on so much more animation, we had to unload at least a hundred shots," Goulekas relates. "We were very lucky to have caught Sony. Once they came onboard, Centropolis did the animation of Godzilla, then sent it to Sony in a Softimage scene file. Then Sony's artists lit and rendered the shots, and added all these cool effects, knocking out streetlights and flipping cars, then composited them. I was amazed how easily Sony was able to incorporate the CFX pipeline into theirs."
Additional destruction and debris work was done at VisionArts. Some of these effects were facilitated through the use of Avid’s Elastic Reality, an advanced warping and morphing package, and Avid Matador, one of the most populer digital paint packages. ER was utilized to alter background plates and manipulate the creature’s footprints, while Matador was needed for touch-up work, wire removal and general painting. (ER was additionally used by CFX’s own rotopaint department to rotoscope and track complex practical elements, including exploding buildings and Manhattanites being trampled.)
With Sony and VisionArts picking up this end of the job, CFX's animators were free to concentrate on making Godzilla mean and menacing in every shot. Unlike the original, whose slow-motion lumbering was intended to give it scale and disguise the man-in-the-suit, Goulekas and Engle rode shotgun to make this Godzilla sleek and graceful, even when breaking the 500 mph speed limit or crashing up through the street for his first close-up. After all the now-you-see-him-now-you-don't shenanigans, the reveal of the new Godzilla involved a fair amount of drama, and a surprising blend of CG and high-speed miniatures. Suddenly the ground starts to shake, cracks radiate through the cement as the creature shatters the asphalt with his head, then rises to his full 200' height directly in front of scientist Nick Tatopoulos (Matthew Broderick). For the shot of Godzilla erupting through street, Engle employed a 1/24 scale miniature and the upper torso of the man-in-suit. This mostly in-camera shot was augmented with rain, spark and debris elements. But for the beauty shot where Godzilla actually rises out of the hole, which lasts a whopping six seconds, Engle and Goulekas opted to use the CG creature. A shot of Godzilla stooping to inspect Dr. Tatopoulos was accomplished with an insert of the 1/6 scale hydraulic upper body, followed by a CG closeup of Godzilla just inches away from the scientist, where the actor was shot on location in New York.
Soon Godzilla is leading a trio of helicopters on a merry chase through the Big Apple. Reminiscent of the canyon pursuit in ID4, the kinetic sequence follows the helicopters careening through corridors of skyscrapers after the behemoth, and was accomplished via a blend of miniature and CG elements. "The helicopter POVs and background plates of the buildings were completely filmed motion control onstage," Engle says. "We just did pans and tilts on the buildings, then added CG helicopters to the shots. The only time we used miniature helicopters was when they exploded."
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