The hype over just which companies provided the computer graphics technology behind the latest blockbuster film has now become an accepted part of the publicity process. Monster films such as Godzilla – which has already accounted for 65% of movie ticket sales in the US since Tuesday, its debut – rely heavily on the effectiveness of the animation of the central character, and Centrololis Effects Inc says it used SoftImage Inc’s SoftImage3D product as its exclusive animation tool for the task. It was used to animate 220 creature shots by 15 animators over 10 months. SoftImage was responsible for the lighting and texturing of Godzilla, as well as character animation. Centropolis teamed up with ViewPoint Data Labs International Inc, which created the 3D digital model of the Godzilla lizard, after the two had worked together on the special effects for Independence Day. The hardware used for the task was a mixture of Silicon Graphics Inc and Pentium-based workstations, and software modeling tools from Alias/Wavefront and Nichimen were also used. Given the size is important advertising campaign, its interesting to see that the computer companies involved in the film measured Godzilla by his 900Mb file size.
