SKREEONK!

Hey all! Jon @ UnCanny here!

I recently received an email from the wonderful editors at Cinefex with exclusive content regarding their upcoming mid-June issue! They’ve got an excellent 14 page spread planned for the Big G (which includes interviews with visual effects supervisor Guillaume Rocheron, among many others!), and its hitting just in time for G-Fest! Here’s our exclusive first look at their content, followed by the lowdown!

“The main challenge in creating Godzilla,” recalled MPC visual effects
supervisor Guillaume Rocheron, “was that this 350-foot-tall beast would be
seen from a human point of view, with extreme closeups on many parts of the
creature. Our modelers and texture artists had to add an incredible amount
of detail — and the result was one of the largest creature assets MPC has
ever built. We developed new in-house tools to make the skin slide over the
muscles in a particular way and better convey the size of the beast. The
tools incorporated sliding between the scales in selected areas and
transitions between the different skin thicknesses across the head and
body.” The look development, done in PrMan, used thousands of maps to drive
fine displacements and different skin qualities across the creature. Fully
ray-tracing the monster revealed even the finest of details, subtly varying
reflection and translucency qualities across the body and the face.

The character was rigged in Maya, with one continuous rigging spine that
curved downward from the head into the tail, enabling animators to pose
Godzilla in a more fluid, elegant way. The single spine rigging also helped
to differentiate the creature¹s anatomy from that of a man in a suit —
although the animation was designed very much around the physiology of an
upright creature, rather than a quadruped. “Godzilla doesn’t behave like a
T-rex or raptor,” said MPC animation supervisor Ferran Domenech. “At the
same time, it couldn’t be so upright that it looked like a guy in a suit. We
had to find a fine balance of character for it, more subtle in its motion.”

Great stuff! Further details, including order-information, are included below!

Fans of one of filmdom’s most iconic monsters won¹t want to miss the
upcoming summer issue of Cinefex, the quarterly film magazine that has been
covering the field of visual effects for 35 years. Due out in mid-June,
Issue #138 features a 14-page story on the making of “Godzilla,” including
in-depth interviews with key effects artists, plus 13 behind-the-scenes
photos and frame clips from the movie, many of them exclusive to Cinefex.
Other stories in this bigger-than-usual issue include “Captain America: The
Winter Soldier,” “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” and “Maleficent,” plus an
article on the legendary stop-motion animator Willis O¹Brien and his bitter
rivalry with producer Herbert M. Dawley.

With two fan-favorite blockbusters in release, and great imagery from each,
we¹re giving covers to both Spider-Man and Captain America, and you get to
choose which cover you want when you purchase your copy as a single back
issue direct from Cinefex.

Pre-order it now, and your issue will go out with our first mailing.

http://www.cinefex.com/backissues/issue138.htm

Huge thanks again to Cinefex for reaching out to us, and doing everything they do for the fans! Make sure and order your issue!

Jon @ UnCanny