CompuServe Messages

Rico, The director of Stargate wanted to achieve a mechanical look to the helmet effect…standard morphing as it existed early last year could not create this effect. The special effects crew at Kleiser-Walczak Construction Company considered using 3D to create the effect, which in many ways was similar to the bat-mobile armor effect and the viper armor effect, both of which had appeared not too long before and were done in 3D. They decided that the motion envolved in the mask shots, including fist fights and wrestling and such would be too complex to model accurately. Instead, already being Elastic Reality customers, asked our company to come up with a means of creating the mechanical look of the effect. Elastic Reality for SGI, at the time, was version 1.3, which was the code base for Elastic Reality for Windows. It could not produce the mechanical effect desired because an important part of the mechanical look required pieces of the armor to telescope out from (or retract into) other pieces. This would produce the crossing-edge problem where two pieces butted up against each other and, because of the actor's motion, would sometimes overlap (cross edge). We created an entirely new warping mode called JIGSAW which treats all shapes or groups of shapes as entirely seperate warps, all computed in parallel, and merged into the final result, in one pass of the warping kernel. This technological advanced was the key to creating the look the director wanted. (continued)