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CG & LIVE ACTION 28 ■ CGW Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 014 with gnarly tree stumps pushed out of the ground and washed over and smoothed with water and rocks. "It looked very pre- historic," Blasset says. All the locations have a Cretaceous aesthetic and resemble the dinosaurs' original habitats 70 million years ago. "The intention," says Nightingale, "was for Walking with Dinosaurs to look as though a real wildlife cameraman had gone back in time to capture the footage. So we found locations, as closely as we could in the modern world, that would replicate Arctic Alaska in the Cretaceous Period." In the digital scenes as well as those containing live-action plates, the objective was the same: to make them as real as possible. To this end, it was imperative to match the level of detail in the CG to that in the natural environments, which are rich with color and texture. "We had to take both the creatures and the environments to a level where they would fit with the live-action plates and audiences wouldn't question it," says Reichelt. To tie the characters into the live-action plates, the crew scanned the locations with LIDAR (Light Detection and Rang- ing). LIDAR uses light pulses to find distance information about environmen- tal objects. The information was also used for previs: framing and editing, and determining camera angles. Indeed, LI- DAR technology has been used for years in CG shots to capture backgrounds, but never before for nearly an entire movie, as it was here. "You will be able to see that this process brings an entirely new level of realism in contact dynamics as the characters interact with each other and their world," says Mike Devlin, CEO of Evergreen Studios. On set, the group used dinosaur stand-ins made with PVC pipes to be sure the characters would fit properly in the shot once they were composited with The Foundry's Nuke. "We needed to validate on set. For instance, we needed to know we would be able to insert three 15-foot-long dinosaurs in a plate, and for every shot, we had a procedure where we would set up the PVC dinosaurs and walk them through their paces. We made sure everything would work once we got back to the studio," says Reichelt. Further establishing the CG into the shots required dynamic interaction between the digital characters and the environ- ments, and footfalls were an important part of that as the characters kicked up grass, rocks, dust, and debris while run- ning, as were the splashes and spray when the beasts fell into the water. "We auto-generated footprints and then used them to displace the ground with just the right pressure," explains Reichelt. "When the characters are running on soft sand, we have clumps of sand coming off the feet. We had contact points and generated a map. Sometimes the feet connected cleanly, sometimes not, but [the map] at least gave us when Longtime dinosaur artist and enthusiast David Krentz (Fantasia 2000, John Carter) created the character designs for the film. He has extensive experience hatching a range of prehistoric beasts for several dinosaur-themed mov- ies, including Disney's Dinosaur, Dinosaur Revolution, and Dinotasia, but he still spent countless hours with at least five paleontologists before reaching the final look for the characters in Walking with Dinosaurs. "I had to keep them in the world of realism, but at the same time caricature them enough so audiences could tell the differences between the characters on screen," says Krentz. As the movie developed, so did the characters, requiring the designer to make slight evolutionary changes to the designs that made them slightly anthropomorphized and appealing to young viewers. Nevertheless, Krentz's designs still had to adhere to the standards set by the scientists: make them as accurate as possible based on the fossil evidence available. To this end, he conducted his own research and was provided up-to-date information by the paleontologists. Krentz modeled the dinosaurs in Pixologic's ZBrush after first making pencil sketches. "I used to do orthographic draw- ings, which is what I did for the Disney dinosaurs in 1996. But with ZBrush, I can get all the hidden areas right away and ■ IN ADDITION TO the scaled dinosaurs, there were two species requiring feathers, resulting in heavy models throughout the scenes. Dinosaur Designs