Post #529909

Bester said:

We have a new Jabba the Hutt that’s so much better than the old one I had to work with. I mean, that one wouldn’t act! It was just a big old rubber thing. But now I’ve got one that’s very articulate. It’s speech is fantastic - the lip-sync is great. The tongue is great, the eye movement - everything!

 

LOL!!!!   XoD

The '97 Jabba was a big CG turdfest.

American Cinematographer said:

Remarkably, Williams and Letteri tackled the five Jabba shots at the end of 1994, prior to the ILM software group's development of the Caricature animation program. Caricature had enabled animators on Dragonheartto work with fully shaded models in real time, resulting in excellent lip-synch animation. For the Star Wars Special Edition, however, Williams was still working with the less-facile technology used on Jurassic Park andCasper. "Spaz just hand-animated all of the lip-synch because that's his style," Letteri marvels. "[Sound designer] Ben [Burtt] did the voice track first. After George approved it, Steve animated to it using Jurassic Parktechnology. He animated the mouth as if it were a hard, almost horn-like material, but with a little more flexibility."

While Williams modeled and animated Jabba, Letteri was responsible for the scene's look and lighting design. "We tend to work like a director and cinematographer," Letteri says. "My job was a bit different than that of a traditional director of photography in that I had to figure out what the inside of Jabba's mouth and his tongue looked like, and how much drool there should be on his chin. I used the original Jabba's textures for reference; the CG model was constructed differently, so we had a Viewpaint artist paint it by hand. I also did a fair amount of repainting myself, and I adapted the shaders I had designed for Jurassic's T-Rex for Jabba's skin and surface textures. I also used some new eye techniques I'd designed for Casper to give Jabba eyes like a cat's or a serpent's. That varied from the original, but I wanted something a little more organic than those glass eyes. George just said, 'Go for it!' He liked the eyes."