Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1011494
46 cgw | e d i t i o n 3 , 2 0 1 8 J U R A S S I C E V O L U T I O N : 2 0 1 8 "He was aware of the limitations of his cra, and I was aware of the limitations of digital. Certainly, when you have a physical dinosaur, everybody reacts differently than if you have a tennis ball on a stick. And, there are places where the actors have to touch dinosaurs." Often, the full-body animatronic di- nosaurs are lying down. When they fight, run, and otherwise move much, they're CG. In addition, the visual effects team would touch up the animatronics to give them life. "We never went into the process ex- pecting every animatronic we shot to stay animatronic," Vickery says, noting that the visual effects artists might replace a claw, a tail, an eye, or otherwise enhance the perfor- mance with some movement. "With actors, a director might do 15 takes to get the right one for the edit. "[With CG] J.A. 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 the digital makeup, replace- ments, and transitions seamless, Scanlan's team built their animatronics from digital files created by ILM modelers. The modelers started with Blue, a dino that's roughly hu- man-size, working in Autodesk's Maya and Pixologic's ZBrush. Blue would be CG, per- formed by animators in many scenes, but in one dramatic sequence, she's strapped down for an operation. "We had extensive previs for the sequenc- es 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 limit of the resolu- tion 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 hundreds of millions of polygons and a scene file of around 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 the pro- cess 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 three dinosaurs new to this film: the Stegosaurus, the Baryonyx, and the new hybrid Indoraptor. The scaled busts were helpful on set for lighting reference and for the actors and filmmakers to see in different lighting conditions. In addition to the scaled bust, the Indoraptor also had a full-size ani- matronic head, foot, and arm. Although the Indoraptor animatronics were used on set, ILM artists oen replaced them later with digital counterparts. "The creature's design evolved in postpro- duction," Vickery says. "So, in the movie it's 99 percent CG." Work on the Indoraptor design started 12 weeks before principal photography with simple concepts. Once the filmmak- ers signed off on the design, Scanlan's team created the scaled bust, and model makers added wear and tear to give the creature a sense of history. The design for the hybrid creature continued later in postproduction, with texture artists add- ing digital wear and tear. "We wanted to give it an interesting backstory," Vickery says. "It's a prototype; its genetics are evolving. So, we gave it flaking skin, irregular teeth. It isn't a beautiful dino- saur like the T. rex or the Velociraptors. It's imperfect. So, because our final model dif- fered slightly, we replaced the animatronic." Texture Texture artist Sally Wilson led ILM's team of 10 artists in London that gave all the dino- saurs their surface texture and colors – that backstory Vickery mentions. These artists tend to be unheralded, but without their skills and talent, the creatures would not look real. For Fallen Kingdom, the director wanted more distinctive and colorful dinosaurs than in the previous films. "We have much more interesting designs and color palettes than we had previously," Wilson says. For example, the Carnotaurus are a burnt red. The Allosaurus are blue. The Indoraptor is black with yellow on its sides. "When he comes out of the shadows, we can't see him until we see the stripe," Wilson says. To create the textures, the artists use Foundry's Mari for painting on the 3D mod- els and Foundry's Nuke for procedural work on unwrapped 2D maps. Sometimes they start with Mari and then refine with Nuke. "Quite a lot of our work involves intricate details in scales, so it's easier to work flat," Wilson says. "It can take hours to paint all the maps. So, if we want to change the size, the rippling on the edges, or add a color across scales, we can step through and THE INDORAPTOR IS CG 99 PERCENT OF THE TIME.