Gollum scenes were filmed 3 times. Once with Andy wearing his Gollum PJs, again with no Andy, and then lastly in the motion capture studio with Andy acting solo.
The shots of Andy acting with the other actors were used as references. The majority of the shots you see are the ones that he acted in, and was then erased from. The digital Gollum was then added in his place. Gollum couldn't just be pasted in over the top, because he is much skinnier than Andy.
As a UI designer, I would advise staying well away from LightWave.
It has a very non-standard and unintuitive interface that would probably drive you nuts!
We teach it here as part of a MultiMedia diploma and students really struggle with it. It also doesn't help that it's a real dog on the mac, under OS9 at least.
3DS Max, Maya, and Cinema4D all share quite similar interfaces now - to varying degrees, but Lightwave has almost nothing in common with them.
My vote would be Maya if you've got the cash and are serious enough to take on a reasonably steep learning curve, otherwise Cinema4D, being almost as powerful (certainly if you're not doing animations), but cheaper and easier to learn.
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Gollum scenes were filmed 3 times. Once with Andy wearing his Gollum PJs, again with no Andy, and then lastly in the motion capture studio with Andy acting solo.
The shots of Andy acting with the other actors were used as references. The majority of the shots you see are the ones that he acted in, and was then erased from. The digital Gollum was then added in his place. Gollum couldn't just be pasted in over the top, because he is much skinnier than Andy.
As a UI designer, I would advise staying well away from LightWave. It has a very non-standard and unintuitive interface that would probably drive you nuts! We teach it here as part of a MultiMedia diploma and students really struggle with it. It also doesn't help that it's a real dog on the mac, under OS9 at least. 3DS Max, Maya, and Cinema4D all share quite similar interfaces now - to varying degrees, but Lightwave has almost nothing in common with them. My vote would be Maya if you've got the cash and are serious enough to take on a reasonably steep learning curve, otherwise Cinema4D, being almost as powerful (certainly if you're not doing animations), but cheaper and easier to learn.