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In creating the CG characters in the game version of Hulk, The Vivendi team was invited onto the film set and allowed to capture assets right from the movie where the “look” of The Hulk and his environment were defined.

The Vivendi Universal team was able to use concept art, maquette’s created by the ILM team that showed body sizes, facial expressions, a 3D model of the Hulk, Eric Bana and the “hulking dogs” as well as cyber-scans of models and the actors.

In addition to the Hulk, capturing the overall scale of his world — from the large honeycomb environment of the base to the un-ending expanse of the desert — were key to the game’s acceptance.

Additionally, environments captured right from the set gave the game environments an added sense of realism, not only because they were familiar, but also because they did, indeed, once exist.

The Hulk game team had full access to the feature film’s assets, such as concept art, cyber-scans of models and actors, and creations by ILM.

“We were set up right next to the film set and given access to the stages,” Barnhart said. “We sent photographers through the film environments to digitally capture the elements and textures of the film, which were given to the artists to interpolate into the game.

“But what was really cool is that I literally walked through the sets, such as the huge underground military base, and got a real feel for them. When playing the game, the military base environment is so true to the film that I have the feeling ‘this really exists — I have been there.’”

Creating the game’s environments also required a bit of technology wizardry from the Vivendi Universal team due to the Hulk’s unique ability to “morph” in size that would also mean that as he grew from 5'10" human size to 15' Hulk size, polygons needed to be acquired from the environment to allow the Hulk to grow.

“The Hulk game environments are not as static as you may have in a video game,” Barnhart added. “Instead each of our walls has several states of being from the solid, untouched wall, the wall that is slightly damaged, severely damaged and then destroyed as the Hulk gains more power and grows, chewing up those polygons.”

The solution was for Vivendi Universal to create a cycling memory for the game that would be able to pull up any version of the wall into memory, dumping previous versions out of memory. This new bit of programming allowed the art team to parcel more polygons to the emerging Hulk as they were being released from the environmental art.

“This is something totally unique that we crafted for the Hulk game,” Barnhart asserted. “But we knew the game would have to involve complete destruction and that it would be one of our biggest challenges so that it would satisfy the expectations of the gamer.”

While the Vivendi Universal team culled art elements created for the film, the game required that they not use a middleware engine, but develop one specifically for the needs of the game that took about two years to develop. Development teams also used Maya software for the model creations, cut scenes and all the 3D aspects of the game.