Will Reichelt |
“We were approached by the BBC and Evergreen Films in 2010 to partner with them on a test for a narrative feature film based on the original Walking With Dinosaurs documentary series,” states Animal Logic VFX Supervisor Will Reichelt (Knowing) who had to reconstruct the Cretaceous Period which occurred 70 million years ago. “We created a short test, a few shots in 3D showing a family of Pachyrhinosaurs in a forest clearing, which gave everyone confidence in the visual direction the film should take. Full production on the film began soon after.” The big screen version had to conform to the established franchise. “The BBC knew they wanted to feature certain specific species of dinosaur, and that part of the appeal of the film was in designing them to be as realistic as possible rather than anthropomorphised and cartoony. There were a solid set of guidelines we were working to, but there was a great deal of creative freedom in terms of how we got from the initial skeleton and muscle reconstructions we were provided by the BBC to the final look of the characters. One of the things the palaeontologists don’t really have much information on is the pigmentation and colouring of the dinosaurs, so we were free to experiment with that quite a bit.”
“We had three new streams of development on this movie that were implemented to get the dinosaurs to look as realistic as possible,” notes Will Reichelt. “The first was a procedural system for creating millions of scales across a surface, called RepTile. It enabled us to automatically populate the skin of the dinosaurs with scales rather than having to do it by hand and having those scales remain rigid while the skin underneath flexed, stretched and compressed. The second was a new muscle system, which we dubbed Steroid. This gave us an automated deformation of the outer skin taking the internal bones, muscles and fat into account, leaving the animators to focus on the character performance rather than having to worry about the technicalities of having to layer in jiggle, inertia and muscle movement by hand. The third was the implementation of physically-plausible shading and lighting, using HDR images shot on set as the basis for the lighting integration of the characters into the shots. The system gave us a pretty realistic looking dinosaur relatively quickly, so that the lighters could spend more time on creative ‘beauty’ lighting.”
Many thanks to Will Reichelt and Emmanuel Blasset for taking the time to be interviewed.