Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1006097
www.postmagazine.com 20 POST JULY 2018 SUMMER MOVIES Vickery says, noting that the visual effects artists might replace a claw, a tail, an eye or otherwise en- hance the performance with some movement. "With actors, a director might do 15 takes to get the right one for the edit. "[With CG,] JA [Bayona] could do the same thing with the animatronic dinosaurs. If he wanted a blink or a slightly different movement in the claws, we could enhance the animatronic." To make this digital makeup, replacements and transitions seamless, Scanlan's team built their ani- matronics from digital files created by ILM modelers. The modelers started with Blue, a dino that's roughly human-size. "We had extensive previs for the sequences with the animatronics, so we knew what pose she'd be in," Vickery says. "We took our digital files of Blue, posed her in the correct lying-down position and then baked all the displacement textures back into the model. We worked out that the resolution limit for the 3D printer Neal [Scanlan] would use was around 1 millimeter, so we made our polygons 1 millimeter square." Blue's digital model would end up having hun- dreds of millions of polygons and a scene file of approximately 4GB. "Neal printed it in resin, and we could literally see the facets of the polygons, all that detail, all the little triangles that made up the polygons," Vickery says. "The detail was fantastic. Every scale, every wrinkle was accurate to the digital model, so we knew if we needed to enhance or replace the animatronic, the files would match." Then, the ILM crew transferred that process they used for Blue to the Tyrannosaurus rex, again using the same one-to-one ratio of 1-millimeter polygons. "Suddenly we had a 23GB file," Vickery says. "The art department said, 'It doesn't open. How did you ever save it?' So, we had to chop the T-rex into pieces using a file-size limit of 4GB to 5GB. That was the largest they could open." Scanlan's team also built scaled busts for Practical busts helped provide lighting references. CG was used to enhance damaged interiors. Blue and Chris Pratt A close up of the Indoraptor.