For King Kong, Weta Digital was challenged to build a full digital reconstruction of downtown Manhattan in the 1930s. To achieve this, we built CityBot. CityBot takes a street plan, and generates period-accurate buildings to fill those streets. You can select the architectural style—so different neighbourhoods feel different. The final buildings are as detailed as those modelled by an artist. This allowed the generation of huge CG neighbourhoods for Kong to rampage through.
Our goal was to create a photorealistic environment as accurate to 1933 New York as we could.
Chris White, VFX Supervisor
An existing model showing the simple geometry of modern New York provided a basis for the digital city. Any building coded blue was built after 1933 and therefore deleted. The model was then compared to 1933 aerial photographs and tweaked accordingly.
Interview with Chris White on King Kong
Chris White was the Computer Graphics Supervisor for the New York sequences on King Kong. Along with supervising artists, one of his major responsibilities was developing the look and technology for building digital 1933 New York City.
Rebuilding New York with CityBot
Maya-based software from Chris White dubbed CityBot rebuilt the city, floor-by-floor, section-by-section, block-by-block, adding intricate and period-accurate detail to the low-res dataset. In all, more than 90,000 buildings were created, which were constructed using 22 million component/cells, including 32,839 buildings for Queens, Brooklyn and New Jersey, and 51 landmark buildings (such as the Empire State Building), covering an area stretching more than 26 miles.