However, rotoscoped animation isn’t far off – certainly in LoTR: The Two Towers this is exactly how some of Gollum was created. At that stage Weta were still using motion capture and hadn’t really used facial capture properly at all (that came along by the time they were doing Kong). Gollum really did use a rotoscoping and even free-hand animation at points, but Serkis was still the model. Now, of course, the rigs are so impressive and the technology so refined that it’s a much more direct translation of the actors performance into the digital costume.
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