Director James Camer- on's Terminator 2 from Tri-Star Pictures has changed the magic of movies forever

Director James Camer-
on's Terminator 2 from
Tri-Star Pictures has
changed the magic of
movies forever.

Many in the computer anima-
tion business have long said that if
Disney's Tron had been a success
at the box office, then Hollywood
would have embraced digital im-
agery back in

1982. "When somebody makes a
computer graphics film that's a
blockbuster, then everybody will
want to get on the bandwagon,"
has been the mantra. Well, thanks
in large part to computer graphics,
Terminator 2 (T2), starring the
world's biggest box office draw, Ar-

nold Schwarzenegger, is the block-
buster the doctor ordered.

T2's other star, T-1000, is a liq-
uid-metal, "polyalloy" robot from
the future, which can transform it-
self into people, knives, and other
things in its single-minded quest
to kill. T-1000 was conjured up for
the film out of bits and bytes by
Industrial Light and Magic (ILM;
San Rafael, CA), the special-effects
facility that George Lucas spun
out of his Star Wars effects team.

Just as Star Wars caused an ef-
fects revolution using motion-con-
trol technology for flying model
spaceships, T2 has already opened
the floodgates for computer graph-
ics. In fact, several feature films
starring digital charactersÑfrom
science fiction insects to humans in
virtual realityÑare in the works,
including one with computer-gen-
erated sets for live actors.

The history of T2 begins more
than two years ago with another
James Cameron film, The Abyss.
The film, a deep-sea drama about
extraterrestrial intelligence, in-
cluded a spectacular scene with a
ray-traced "pseudopod" water ten-
tacle, animated at ILM.

The shimmering, gravity-defy-
ing pseudopod, which at one point
shapes itself into human faces,
g proved to the director that comput-, er graphics technology had
 reached critical mass, that is, the
a break-even point in terms of cost,
time, and effort. In fact, he was so
convinced of the technology's po-
tential that he wrote the script for
T2 around his idea for a computer-
generated robot.

T2's effects supervisor Dennis
Muren, who was a member of the
original Star Wars team, says,
"With The Abyss, if the computer
graphics didn't work we could have
left it out. But Terminator 2 could
not have worked without itÑit
was the main part of the showÑso
there was much more at stake.
And on this show, we've tried to
apply computer graphics to the im-
ages, as opposed to the other way
around. Jim came up with the im-
ages he wanted to see first, and
then we did whatever was appro-
priate to get those images."

What Cameron wanted was a
convincing chrome character, the
T-1000, that could walk through
fire, turn into a police officer with
self-healing bullet holes, pass flu-
idly through openings, and ulti-
mately be spectacularly destroyed
in a vat of molten steel. Other,
more traditional special-effects
techniques, such as clay animation
or motion control, would not have
been able to do the job as well, as
smoothly, or with the freedom of
control. And most other techniques
would have taken more time.

The task of modeling the polyal-
loy T-1000 out of patches and
splines fell mainly to chief comput-
er animator Steve Williams, a
classically trained animator who
had worked with Alias (Toronto)
for two years (ILM uses Alias soft-
ware for modeling and animation
augmented with proprietary code
and Pixar's Renderman for render-
ing) and joined ILM to work on
The Abyss. "The task was to build
a computer-generated man from
head to toe. So we painted a grid
on Robert Patrick [who plays the
robot when in its policeman dis-
guise], and we shot him with
synced cameras from the front and
side for days so we could study his
mannerisms," Williams explains.
Williams, Geoff Campbell, and
Lincoln Hu created four models of
the robot, each with increasingly
greater detail. The first model
looked like a "blobby man" made
out of mercury, while the fourth
was a nearly exact metallic model
of the actor, down to the wrinkles
in his police uniform.

These models were used with
awesome effectiveness in the scene
that establishes the T-lOOO's in-
vincibility; where it walks calmly
out of a blazing wrecked truck in a
Los Angeles flood-control channel.
With the fiery environment reflec-
tion-mapped on its body, the robot
changes gradually from a crude
human form into a chrome cop.
The computer character is posi-
tioned to match up perfectly with a
shot of the actor, and the transfor-
mation to live action is accom-
plished with an animated reveal
that follows the robot's contours.
The transformation complete, Pat-
rick walks away with the quiet de-
termination of Death himself.

The next time we see the T-
1000, it has taken the form of a
woman, the foster mother of the
boy the robot has been sent to ter-
minate. With her arm formed into
a giant blade she/it kills the foster
father. The blade used for the mur-
der was actually a prosthetic de-
vice created by makeup master
Stan Winston. But computer
graphics was required to transform
the woman's arm and to transmute
her into the police officer persona.

The shape-shifting killer isn't
limited to imitating people. In one
breathtaking scene, it surprises an
unfortunate guard by masquerad-
ing as a checkerboard floor in a
psychiatric hospital. After the
guard steps on the linoleum, the
"floor" rises and transforms itself
into a copy of the unsuspecting
man. This transformation was ac-
complished using a proprietary
program that stretches an elastic
surface between the floor and the
robot.

A similar transformation occurs
later in a steel mill. After being
frozen by liquid nitrogen and hav-
ing his legs break off, the T-1000 is
shattered into pieces using a dum-
my filled with metal flakes. Mo-
ments later Serabin, a metal like
Lead, was used to show the shards
melting. And then Mercury was
employed to show puddles of metal
running together. But once the
puddle gets large, the computer
graphics take over again as the ro-
bot reincarnates and becomes hu-
man again.

It Talks Too

The first transformation scene
that was animated, eerily reminis-
cent of The Abyss pseudopod, has
the robot liquefy, flow into a heli-
copter, reform, and speak a line of
dialog while still in a metallic
state. Jay Riddle, the supervisor
for this shot, explains, "When he
pours himself in through the bro-
ken chopper canopy, the environ-
ment had to reflect off his chrome.
So we photographed the interior of
the helicopter on location from the
point of view of the T-1000. Then
Diana Ace [an animator at ILM]
took all those separate pictures
and reassembled them into six im-
ages that [formed the reflection
map]."

The robot tells the terrified pilot,
"Get out." This was accomplished
by scanning Patrick's head with
lasers at the Cyberware Laborato-
ry (Monterey, CA) while he pro-
nounced "G-E-T O-U-T" one pho-
neme at a time. Then, after trans-
forming the data from the scan
into patches, Riddle says, "We in-
terpolated through those sculp-
tures sort of like key frames."

The ultimate transformation
scene, however, happens when the,
T-1000 falls into a vat of melted
steel and changes insanely
through all the forms it has taken
on throughout the movieÑand
then some. This heavy-metal swan
song was ILM's masterpiece. Wil-
liams recalls, "Andrew Schmidt
and I used every trick in the book
for that, including the kitchen
sink. The whole concept was that
he was short-circuiting, so we had
a field day with the metamorpho-
sis, popping heads and hands out
from anywhere. It involved a lot of
programmers and a lot of anima-
tors. Everyone said we couldn't do

it, which just gave us immediate
determination."

The people who played the ro-
bot's human forms all had to
thrash about in a pool full of water
and mineral oil lit from below with
orange lights. Their images were
then blended in and out of the com-
puter-generated form, which
swirls around and ultimately turns
inside out before dissolving into
the steel.

Assistant effects supervisor,
Mark Dippe, says of the death
scene, "We were very involved
with that shot emotionally. There
were so many complications also,
with liquid substances flowingÑ
both live and computer-generat-
edÑand with weight and heat,
which are so challenging. And its
very abstractÑa big dissipation
into nothingness."

A number of other techniques
were used to make the impossible
look perfectly believable. Fre-
quently throughout the film the
robot is struck by bullets that
make splashing holes in its polyal-
loy body. Makeup artist Winston
accomplished the hits in live action
by putting spring-loaded, silver
rubber craters, which pop open by
remote control, in the actor's cos-
tume. Complex puppets were used
when the robot gets hit with explo-
sive shells that tear open its head
or body. But all these wounds heal
moments later using computer-an-
imated morphing techniques.

The Magic ot Morphing

Some morphing techniques in-
volve 3D steps, but the basic proc-
ess is a two-dimensional image-
warping technique that ILM first
used in the movie Willow to trans-
form animals from one species to
another. To close a bullet hole, for
example, first the actor is filmed
with no holes at all. The footage is
scanned, and the morphing pro-
gram is used to stretch open a
space to fit a 3D, computer-gener-
ated hole. The audience sees the ef-
fect in reverse, with the hole
shrinking until it disappears.

The most amazing 2D morph
didn't involve healing wounds,
though. In physical combat with
Schwarzenegger, the T-1000, in its
policeman persona, is thrown front
first against a wall and reforms it-
self to face forward, rather than
turning around to continue fight-
ing. The trick required Patrick to
pose in both positions, and then a
morph/dissolve was made between
the two shots. Though the effect
was simple in concept, tweaking
and blending the morph took ani-
mator John Berton two weeks of
hard work.
A "supercharged morph" was
used for an astonishing hospital
scene where the robot walks
through a security gate, oozing
around the bars like taffy. This
was accomplished by filming Pat-
rick and the bars separately. Then,
using measurements of the bars,
the computer model of Patrick, in-
cluding a laser-scanned face, was
carefully matched to the live ac-
tion and walked through the bars.
Using an ILM program called
"Make Sticky," the bars distorted
the T-lOOO's contours, including
the texture map of Patrick that
was carefully projected onto it. Fi-
nally, the composite was touched
up with digital paint work by
Douglas Chiang.

There was one great computer-
animated effect done outside of
ILM. Robert and Dennis Skotak at
4Ward Productions (Los Angeles)
used Macintosh computers to shat-
ter buildings for a terrifyingly real
nuclear holocaust that destroys
Los Angeles in a dream sequence.

First an aerial still of the city
was taken, enlarged, and touched
up. Then an overlay of acetate was
put on it, and a matte painting was
made of the city in ruins. The Elec-
tric Image Animation System,
from Electric Image Inc. (Pasade-
na, CA), was used to generate an
expanding sphere of light that rep-
resented the atomic blast as well
as a shock wave on its leading
edge. Electric Image wrote special
code to animate the buildings
crumbling and falling in millions
of ashen fragments. The elements,
including model houses in the fore-
ground, were assembled in multi-
ple passes with optical techniques.

High-Wire Act

At ILM and elsewhere, comput-
er graphics technology is being
used even more now for digital
compositing than for animation.
One of the most common tasks dig-
ital systems are required to do for
movies is "wire removal," that is
covering objects, such as wires,
that you don't want to show with
color from neighboring pixels. Pa-
cific Data Images (PDI; Sunnyvale,
CA) did two such shots for Termi-
nator 2, including one in which
Schwarzenegger rides a motorcycle
suspended by wires to jump an em-
bankment. The wire rig was
erased by manually pinpointing it
in several key frames, and then
letting the system erase it.

Another shot, of a chase se-
quence with a truck crashing
through a wall toward the camera,
was different. Instead of wire re-
moval, the shot needed to be
flipped over, right to left, for the
sake of continuity. That was easy
enough, but there was a street sign
in the shot that would have turned
into mirror writing if the film were
simply turned over. So the soft-
ware had to cut out the original
street sign and paste it on top of
the flipped sign, while automati-
cally tracking the motion. PDI's
LA studio head Jamie Dixon ex-
plained that they also removed a
scratch that ran continuously
through another shot, "That's
probably the first example of digi-
tal scratch removal, but it won't be
the last." Indeed, there are thou-
sands of old movies crying to be
cleaned up, color-corrected, and
born again.

"It seems like in the past year,
everybody is jumping into this,
and the technology is ramping up
all at the same time," reports Jim
Rygiel, digital effects supervisor at
Boss Film, a Los Angeles film ef-
fects facility. "You can almost do

anything with a pixel; it's a lot eas-
ier than pulling the process opti-
cally and chemically. You have a
greater depth with optical, but you
have a greater control with digi-
talÑand less drudge work."

Present, Past, and Future

According to Variety magazine,
T2 cost more than $100 millionÑ
the most expensive movie in histo-
ry. But don't blame that on the
digital effects. About one-third
went to sequel rights acquisition
and to pay Schwarzenegger. The
movie was also completed in an in-
credibly short period of time,
which made everything more ex-
pensive. Then figure in the exten-
sive mayhem of crashing trucks,
helicopters, and the destruction of
a huge exterior set, and the undis-
closed figure for the computer
graphics is a relatively modest ex-
pense. Nevertheless, ILM spent
several million dollars expanding
its computer facilities, buying doz-
ens of Silicon Graphics (Mountain
View, CA) machines, and writing
new code for the project.

In the wake of T2, what kind of
computer imagery can we look for-
ward to in the future? ILM won't
be specific, of course, but Doug
Kay, who started ILM's computer
graphics department along with
George Joblove, speculates, "We're
very interested in making ex-
tremely realistic characters and
creatures that don't exist and that
you couldn't do with mechanical
effects because they wouldn't be
able to act as well." And Riddle
adds, "Our main goal is to try to do
things that could be done by more
traditional ways, but computer
graphics can do them smoother,
with more control, and more amaz-
ingly. Moving, living, real-world
things could be in our future. We'll
make some more history soon," he
predicts.

Kay speculates why it took the
film industry so long to accept
computer imagery: "If Tron had
opened up the film industry to
computer graphics back in '82, the
technology would have fallen far
short of people's expectations. It
was expensive, slow, and painful to
do. It's only been in the last couple
of years, with the vast improve-
ment in equipment, that it's been
cost effetive."

Muren, as knowledgeable about
special effects as anyone on Earth,
says, "I don't think the film indus-
try cares one way or another about
[any particular technology]. People
used to throw their hands up and
say, 'Computer graphics is too
scary, and it may not get done in
time.' And you can't be late in this
businessÑyou can't. But after The
Abyss, Jim [Cameron] said, 'You
guys are ready.' And we were able
to do it [T2]Ñon time and on bud-
get. This stuff's finally come of age.
It's a different world than it was
before."          CGW