The goal for The Incredible Hulk was to redesign the look of the Hulk to give him a greater range of emotions. All images ™ & © 2008 Marvel Ent. Courtesy of Rhythm & Hues. 

In 2003, Universal released Ang Lee's adaptation of The Incredible Hulk, one of the most popular and enduring Marvel superheroes (titled Hulk). Five years later, Universal has released yet another version of The Incredible Hulk (which opened June 13th). This new Hulk movie is actually a "let's start from scratch again and do it right this time" concept. That's because Lee's cerebral approach did not wow the fan base.

Five years later, Marvel Studios is trying to re-launch the franchise on its own -- Universal is only distributing the movie. French action specialist Louis Leterrier (The Transporter) directed a brand new cast, featuring Edward Norton as Bruce Banner/The Hulk, and opted for a completely different approach to visual effects. In 2003, Industrial Light & Magic created some 600 effects shots. In 2008, VFX Supervisor Kurt Williams and VFX Producer Paul Molles oversaw about 800 shots produced by seven different facilities. Rhythm & Hues (including R&H India) produced 224 character animation shots, plus 10 composites, while Hydraulx realized 248 shots featuring complex composites, CG environments, CG helicopter and a full CG Abomination transformation. Other key vendors included Soho VFX (114 shots -- composites and CG environments) and Image Engine (75 shots -- blood drop shot, plus a CG environment for Rhythm & Hues). Lola VFX, G Creative and X1 also worked on the project.

One of the first issues to address was the original Hulk movie and its many years of visual development. "We viewed Ang Lee's film with a lot of respect, especially as it related to the visual effects work," Williams notes. "There were several new goals from the beginning that we thought would improve the character in our movie. Louis' style of filmmaking is dramatically different, and stylistically our film was going to be different by virtue of that. From day one, we decided to redesign the look of The Hulk to start. We returned to a lot of the original material from the comic books and felt like we needed to push the character visually and behaviorally, giving him a greater range of emotions. In order to do that, we needed a new look for the character making him more accessible to the audience visually. Banner's character arc in the movie would be complete by maximizing the thread between Banner and Hulk.

"We hired Aaron Sims to do the initial design with direction from original artwork from the comics and a basic wish list. His eyes were a huge focus because we needed the audience to be able to read his emotions and see Banner's inner struggle through expression. So, we lightened the eyes and made them very reflective. Once the initial design was complete, we delivered the 3D model and textures to Rhythm & Hues for rigging and design. Our approach allowed us to import Aaron's work into the R&H system, complete movement studies based on low-resolution geometry, and see where there were technical conflicts or aesthetic changes in the body after we see him moving in the motion capture movement studies. R&H would make some changes very quickly based on these studies, and the model would go back to Aaron to finesse textures, very specific facial shape changes, and refine his hair and be able to see a rendered version while R&H was building and rigging the character. We would re-inject these changes back to R&H and repeat until Louis and Marvel were happy."