One of the most daring shots in the film occurs in this sequence, where the CG Godzilla actually eludes his pursuers by leaping on top of another building, something the original lumbering Godzilla could never even fantasize about. "We don't just have 30-story buildings, there are also some five story buildings, which Godzilla uses as steps, and we added some impact and flying debris when he stepped on them," Engle reveals.
"He's not like the old Godzilla, who's very lumbering and clumsy," Goulekas adds. "The way he climbs onto things is really very agile. It was so cool to make this massive creature so graceful. Even when he's traveling at speeds of 150 mph, he still maintains his mass."
Poised atop the building, Godzilla makes a tempting target. One of the helicopters fires twin CG missiles at him, courtesy of VisionArts, but he leaps off the building at the last minute, revealing the Chrysler building standing in the background behind where Godzilla just was. Both missiles hit the upper section of the Chrysler building and the whole dome sags down and falls into the street, more miniature mayhem courtesy of Joe Viskocil. "The interesting thing about this sequence is first the helicopters chase the creature, and then they get chased by the creature," Engle grins. "We used the 1/24 scale man-in-suit creature and 1/24 scale buildings for a shot where he crashes through a building, surprising a helicopter hovering in front of a big hole in another building - they think he must be in there, but he actually breaks out behind them and it's pretty violent. He claws one chopper, and sends it crashing into a building. The claw was CG and the chopper was a 1/6 scale model we shot high-speed, out of control, ramming into this building. Then we cut back to a wide shot, as Godzilla opens his jaws and snaps one helicopter and just crushes it. That was a mixture: the helicopter itself and Godzilla were CG, but we shot a separate pyro element of an exploding helicopter between two pieces of wood to simulate the jaws, then we tracked that pyro element onto the CG helicopter to make it appear to explode."
Blame the demise of the third and final helicopter on Engle. "I'm very proud of that shot because it was my idea. I thought it would be so cool to play it as a moment where we don't see the creature. The pilot just looks out his window and says, ëI think I lost him' and then we cut to a shot looking down on the helicopter as Godzilla crouches below, waiting, then the creature opens his jaws and comes toward the camera."
After a series of hairsbreadth escapes and counterattacks, our heroes make their way to Madison Square Garden, where they discover the truth about Godzilla ñ he's a she, or perhaps an it! While negotiating the bowels of the deserted sports arena, they realize they're not alone ñ the place is loaded with eggs, which begin to hatch, unleashing Godzilla's lethal progeny. Dubbed the "Baby ’Zillas," the hatchlings are far from cute, and are soon chasing our heroes through the Garden. Although the sequence relied heavily on Baby ’Zilla suits and mechanical puppets created by Tatopoulos Designs Inc., it also demanded 50 CG shots, some involving hundreds of Godzilla's offspring. VisionArt was originally going to handle all the Baby ’Zilla shots using motion capture; when that approach was abandoned, they began to keyframe animate and render the Babies using Prisms software ñ which is primarily used for creating particle effects like fire and water. Meanwhile, CFX was animating in Softimage and rendering in Mentalray. "The two systems are totally incompatible," Goulekas says, shaking her head. "I said, 'Oh my God, why're we using two different softwares? Aren't you concerned about look continuity?'"
But the problem went deeper than that. "Prisms is great for effects using particle animation," Goulekas explains, "but it's not for character animation. The people at VisionArt do effects really well, but they didn't have any character animators. You can't turn an effects animator into a character animator anymore than you can have a character animator churn out really beautiful particles. It's two different breeds."
Almost. The fact is, while VisionArt's Baby ’Zillas left a lot to be desired when animated in Prisms, the company had devised a brilliant texture mapping and rendering technique utilizing the same software. "They had this automated tool that figured out where the lights in the scene were and got us 80 percent there right off the bat, really brilliant," Goulekas states. "They already had the Baby ’Zillas texture mapped, so I was thinking, 'Okay, how can I have CFX animate in Softimage, then have VisionArt texture map, light and render using Prisms, without starting from scratch?'"
As Goulekas reluctantly took the 50 Baby ’Zilla animation shots away from VisionArt and brought them back to CFX, she was desperately trying to figure out how to make the two incompatible softwares compatible. "In Prisms, you work with polygons while in Softimage, you work in nurbs," Goulekas says. "I came up with this polygonal pipeline that enabled us to import VisionArt's polygonal model into Softimage, where it could be animated at CFX. Afterwards, CFX download the polygons of the creature frame by frame and imported it back into Prisms so VisionArt could light and render it there."
As luck would have it, CFX was too hard pressed to animate all 50 Baby ’Zilla shots. Goulekas approached Tippett Studios about tackling the remaining 12 shots, but it was futile asking the auteurs of animation to handle a partial sequence. Almost in desperation, Goulekas offered the final 12 shots to VisionArt on one condition: "I said, 'You can't get the Babies done in Prisms, you have to switch over to Softimage.' So now this poor company had me telling them they had to switch softwares and they didn't even have Softimage. In midstream, they changed their whole methodology. They switched over to Softimage and got three pretty good animators tackling those last 12 Baby shots."
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