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n n n n Character Animation to distinguish Spider-Man's performance from the characters in every other superhero movie out there," says Cook. Animators created distinctive superhero moves for the CG character with some par- ticular behavioral characteristics that still pre- served Garfield's performance as the young Spider-Man. "When he swings down the street," Cook says, "rather than being totally in control, there are times when he goes into a free fall. We hope this is a bit vertigo-inducing for the audience. And, when he hits the bot- tom of the swing after a free fall, there's a lot of reaction. Yet, he still has an acrobatic qual- ity, which is sympathetic to the comic book, to the poses drawn in two dimensions, and to Andrew's approach to the character." One animator in particular, Michael Beau- lieu, who had been a comic book illustrator and is a Spider-Man fan, helped the animators hit the comic poses with the CG character. "The way we choreographed the character in and out of the poses makes the comic book [poses] seem like snapshots taken of those performances," Schaub says. "In many of the action sequences, we' motion so that the iconic poses really paid off. We also animated the focal length of the lens to push the perspective like the artwork in comic books. We' d ramp down to slow get the comic book composition with extreme foreshortening using a really short lens." In the slow-motion shots, the secondary motion became especially important. "He'll be flying through the air toward the camera and shoot a web," Schaub says. "With the force of that action, you can see his body mass d hit the pose, and then 30 June/July 2012 ripple, the thigh muscle jiggle. You'll even see a jiggle in the cheeks. Having that nuance helps sell the fact that there's a real mass, which is something really obvious when you evaluate athletes in slow motion." Each of the CG Spider-Man's muscles had controls the animators could use to hand-ani- mate the muscle masses. "We didn't expect to see him as close as we did, so we set up those controls as additional features," Schaub says. Fine details, such as frayed threads in the seams of Spider-Man's CG suit and piling on the sur- face of the fabric, also added realistic details. Leapin' Lizards The Lizard, however, which Cook describes as like a dinosaur from the hips down and a bodybuilder from the hips up, had a full simu- lation system. As the story goes, Connors had lost an arm in an accident. Hoping to grow the arm back in much the same way that lizards can regenerate a tail, Connors develops a se- rum based on lizard DNA. The serum works. His arm grows back. But, he becomes a nine- foot-tall lizard with a human brain. "He doesn't look like Rhys Ifans, but we had to put Rhys's character into it," Cook says. "He's angry and powerful, but he's also intellectual, haughty, and athletic. He has a broad range of action and emotion and intel- lectual intent." His intent, in fact, is to turn the population of New York City into lizards like himself. "The Lizard is the most complex charac- ter we've created at Imageworks," says David Smith, digital effects supervisor. "His design mimics a large Komodo dragon, a massive creature with heavy musculature, all of which responds dynamically. He has his own muscle structure and skin sliding over it. We gave him a tremendous amount of animation controls for flexing and breathing, and facial controls for a full emotional performance in his face. All those things are normal for us. But, his leathery skin had to bend and fold in a unique way." Animators moved his limbs and joints, and could tense muscles as well. Once they had positioned the 500-pound reptile, simulation kicked in. "We had dynamic simulations of the muscles inside the creature and skin simu- lations that rode on top," Smith says. "And then we added a lab coat that gets torn up when he transforms and after his run-ins with the police." Cloth simulation moved the coat. Modelers built the Lizard in Autodesk's Maya, and then the artists sculpted each scale on the Lizard individually using Pixologic's ZBrush. Because the scales don't lift off the skin like fish scales, they didn't have to move inde- pendently. Instead, the artists sculpted the scales in the direction they needed to bend and fold. "To get fine detail throughout, the final ZBrush-painted model had 128 million poly- gons," Smith says. "Then, because it would take forever to render, we transferred the ZBrush model to [Autodesk's] Mudbox, which converted it to vector-based displacement." Texture artists painted gunk and crud into the cracks and crevices between the scales to give the CG surface a more organic quality, and the creature team layered fine hair on top. "The hair isn't like peach fuzz," Smith says. "It's more a fine flaking or breakup that gives the surface a nice wash to break up the lighting