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GODZILLA VS. KONG www.postmagazine.com 18 POST MAY/JUNE 2021 er gorillas and primates to study how their features change as they age, "keeping in mind that Kong is an anthropomorphized ape and has a lot of human characteristics," says Hirota. They also studied the physicality of older bodybuilders and weight lifters. Two setups were used to handle Kong's muscle simulations. For shots that required fine muscle and tissue detail, they modeled the skeleton, muscles and tissue with thickness for the fascia and skin, and then used Ziva Dynamics' FEM Solver, a phys- ics-based muscle simulator, which gave a believable physicality to the creatures. For efficiency on shots that didn't require such hero simulations, the artists developed a body muscle system in Autodesk's Maya with an anatomical procedural jiggle rig that ran in near realtime for rapid iteration. The artists could mix the results from Ziva with the realtime Maya jiggle rig on a shot-by-shot basis. Scanline further developed an auto simulation process for the muscles, jiggle and hair, which could run over a series of shots to increase effi- ciency even more. On the aesthetic front, getting the right look for an aged Kong required some back and forth between Scanline and the director and studio. "We needed to get the right amount of beard coverage and aging in the groom," Hirota explains. Kong has a number of different groom states throughout the film — dry, wet, oily and burnt — which had to be tracked for continuity. Artists generated his hair using Chaos' VrayHairNextMtl. The groom was done with Maya's XGen and the simulation in Maya's nHair. "We spent a good deal of effort on introducing the aging and placement of both gray and white hairs in his groom," says Hirota. "Once we were happy with the base look of the fur, we developed the other variants that are seen in the film, includ- ing the various stages of wetness, and a dusty and oily version from his final confrontation with Mechagodzilla." Scanline, in fact, completely overhauled its hair system to allow for interactive manipulation of the guide hairs, and created a multi-shot hair simu- lation tool. All the fur elements were created by sculpting guide curves. "At the outset, we would start with a smaller amount of guide curves and try to push the groom to about 70 percent completion. We were able to change the parameters of all the grooming at- tributes on the fly without having to redo every- thing, as is the case with a purely sculpting-based grooming workflow," Hirota says. "Although we were using a photorealistic approach, we were still able to utilize some of the purely sculpting-based grooming tool features to add finer details when required." As Hirota points out, Kong's groom was so com- plex that the team was limited in terms of efficien- cy and iterative abilities. To solve that, they split the ape's groom into 10 smaller sections, resulting in faster hair generation and preview times within the viewport. They also harnessed the viewpoint ren- der features in Maya's Viewport 2.0, which provides full shading for fur, as well as lighting and shadow previews. "Being able to view something that closely re- sembled how the rendered fur would look without having to go through render tests meant we were able to iterate much faster," he says. In all, Kong has over six million hairs (6,358,381 to be exact) that were simulated in every shot he is in. One of the more difficult aspects of Kong, accord- ing to Hirota, was due to his human-like qualities, particularly when expressing human-like emotions. "As we knew Kong's performance was going to be crucial to the story and that he was going to have to convey a wide range of emotions, we dedicated a focused effort into rebuilding our eye model for Kong's eyes," he says. The group worked on accurately replicating the shape of the cornea to refract light and interact properly with the iris, as well as added a thin mem- brane where the eye veins were so they weren't simply painted onto the sclera. They further added a tear film and had full control of the meniscus, enabling them to control the mix of oil and water that sits on the surface of the eye. "All these additions meant we were able to get proper colorization and increased realism into our eye model," Hirota says. Kong exhibits a wide range of emotional states throughout the film, from tender moments with the human Jia, to epic moments of rage. "Especially for moments when Kong needs to express specific emotions, we would motion-cap- ture a full performance for Kong (both body and face)," says Hirota. This was done by implement- ing a new facial capture system using software from Faceware Technologies, and throughout the process, harnessed the feedback from machine learning to help improve and refine the targeting of the human performance to drive Kong's face. Additionally, the group referenced a study on primate FACS from the University of Portsmouth to discern the differences between the human and chimpanzee faces. MECHAGODZILLA For this mechanical beast, Scanline received an approved design from the client, but had to turn that into a fully-articulated creature that could function in 3D in all of the ways required of him. According to Hirota, the team started by develop- ing all the geometry and mechanisms for how his joints would function without interpenetration. This entailed creating gimbaling surfaces and sliding metal panels, as well as bespoke mechanisms. Given the creature's size and scale, the artists further applied additional small-scale details to its surface and internal build to reflect its sheer size and construction history. Mechagodzilla's weaponry was designed to work within its structure. Unlike Godzilla — and Kong — Mecha has no muscles or skin.