Brady says for the first time ILM allowed its artists the option of using two animation platforms on Hulk: Maya, its usual software of choice, and Softimage 3.9. It was all part of treating the CG creation like a real actor and using whatever animation tool they felt comfortable with. For Brady, who previously worked on the special edition of Hulk, there are a lot of similarities to the beloved alien in terms of eye movement.

Close-ups show the excellent detail of the animation work.

The Eyes Have It
"It's all about emotion and retaining certain dirt and imperfections that make it seem more believable. E.T. wouldn't move from one pose to another cleanly. He would always have a little bobble. Similarly with Hulk, every time his head would rotate, he would capture some of that real life dirt. Even in video reference, he just kept his eyes constrained to a certain fixed point in space. Like real life, you always are fixing on one object even if scanning a large vista. Your eye doesn't move cleanly from left to right—it pops. Believe it or not, that is a reality breakthrough that early CG characters didn't have. We made big use of these eye constraints in E.T. and called them micro darts. If you study acting, you see a lot of these pops in the eye movement. There are eye twitches in Nick Nolte's performance that we would look at as beautiful dirt. We studied Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. If you look closely, there is a lot of fire and intensity that goes on in their eyes that doesn't go on in CG. Why is that? The eye is not a perfect spherical surface, it's actually a bumpy thing, so as the eye is darting back and forth, it's picking up all sorts of new highlights. You see the change in the sparkle.

It ain't easy being green.

"As small of a detail as that sounds, the eyes are the most important thing. You can get sub surface scattering, muscle relaxation and textures to look entirely believable, but if the eyes are all wrong the whole thing falls apart. I had a great discussion with Nolte about eye blink. There's a shot when Hulk first sees Betty in San Francisco and he drops the rock and he gives up. He slowly blinks and there's a real fine line. Do we give him a three frame or five frame blink? And a difference of just a few frames turns him from appearing thoughtful to sleepy.

"Nick said we should consider going the other way and holding that blink and making it a very defeated performance. I thought it was a really good idea. Nick knew all about the importance of a blink and the length of holding your eyes shut. I think it's one of Nick's great performances on this show and the truth is great acting is great animation—they're one and the same. There are frequencies and rhythms that happen that to me are akin to a great jazz performance. For me, the biggest thing walking out of Hulk is that Ang would talk about the Hulk as an actor. Even though it was Ang's performance [that defined him], it wasn't like, 'Move this three frames there or four frames there.' It was like, 'Hey, why does Hulk look sleepy here?'"

Bill Desowitz is the editor of VFXWorld.com.