A basic skinning is, you take points on the skin of the character, or the geometry of the character, and attach it to the bones underneath. So as Gollum bends and moves around, the muscles would flex and move like real muscles would, and allow Gollum to get skinned through this muscle system, which was a completely different way of doing things at the time.Įveryone has something slightly different, but it all is based on skinning. When we did Gollum, I was head of the creatures department, and we were writing our own volume-preserving muscle system that allowed us to basically take a skeleton, where we actually built the bones and everything for Gollum, and then put the muscles onto the skeleton and attached them at the proper points. So it’s lots of different areas of technology within Weta that put all that together. Well, the Subsurface technology itself, was actually Ken McGaugh and Joe Letteri who did the majority of the work for that, and they basically took a concept paper that had been written and implemented the math and the information in the paper into a shader-based system, so that we could put it onto the skin of Gollum. What was the process of creating that technology like? It’s different implementations of it, but it’s the same basic concept that was back on Gollum. It spreads the light as it goes through the surface so you get that skin-like feel. It’s basically like, if you light a wax candle, you see the diffusion of the light through it. Yeah, it’s called Subsurface and we actually got an Oscar for that technology.

That was something that had never been done before. I remember reading that the reflection of light on and under Gollum’s skin and the way you could see his veins was one of the biggest innovations that you guys pioneered. Because he was so skinny, you saw all of the muscles moving under his skin.

And because we were inventing technology as we were doing it, it was a huge challenge. Up to that point, you’d seen a lot of CG creatures, but none to the level of Gollum, where the detail him an actor on screen, rather than just a scary monster, which is what a lot of the CG creatures up to that point had been. Eric Saindon: When we did Gollum, no one had really done a CG creature mixed with live action that you were supposed to believe was just a creature in the scene.

Who plays gollum in lord of the rings