'Jurassic Park' Animator Shares How CGI Brought Dinosaurs To Life
1. They begin with drawn designs and prosthetics of the different dinosaurs.
Three of the biggest scenes in the film included Velociraptors, Brachiosauruses, and, of course, the Tyrannosaurus rex, which Williams worked on.
Courtesy of Steve Williams.A T. rex drawing by Williams used to figure out where joints on the dinosaur would go.2. Next, those renderings needed to make their way into the computer.
They scanned models, including ones for the T. rex and the Velociraptors, into the computers.The Academy screengrabAccording to FXGuide, Williams took a model of a 5-foot T. rex made by Stan Winston to scan."In order to get it into the computer we actually fire a laser at the three-dimensional rubber prosthetic model and extract the data so the computer had it essentially," says Williams.
Williams explains it's like the opposite of 3-D printing with them taking an object and turning it into data.
3. They then reconstruct the data to make it work in the computer.
These are two images of T. rex data from Williams' monitor using software called Alias.
4. An animation piece of software called SoftImage 3D is used to figure out the joint placement on the dinosaurs. UniversalHere, you can see one of the Brachiosauruses in the beginning of the film.
This is the framework for the dinosaur that helps provide its structure allowing it to stand up, move, and run.
"This is the first shot I animated for the movie after I built all of the T. rex data," says Williams. "It took me months to get this run right, but once done, we reused the run data for the rest of the jeep-chase shots and ultimately for the following two 'Jurassic Park' movies."
"We used a program called Viewpaint, which allowed us to actually paint the texture of the skin in the computer so now we have this textured map," says Williams.
7. To put all of the separate images together, they needed to be rendered by massive graphics computers.
"Now we substitute in this high-resolution mesh data into a low resolution wireframe. That's all being done in computer," says Williams. "It pretty much took 10 hours to calculate one frame. You have to remember film is 24 frames per second. So it would sit there and crunch all night."
Williams built and animated the image below of the first fully rendered T. rex test. It was this video that convinced the producer Kathleen Kennedy and Steven Spielberg that "Jurassic Park" should be made in CGI rather than stop motion.
Courtesy of AMPAS Williams also animated all of the shots in a famous T. rex Jeep-chase sequence. He says each frame in the entire sequence took an estimated 12 hours to render.
The point where the T. rex breaks through the log is 75 frames long.
8. From there, the dinosaur needs to be put into a scene through a process called compositing.
This is where all the pieces to the puzzle are assembled together. CGI shots are combined together with live-action shots and any background and foreground imagery referred to as plate photography.
In this case, live-action shots of actors were combined with photography shoots in Kauai and ILM's work on the Brachiosauruses and birds.
Here's the final shot with the added dinosaurs:Universal9. Once it's put together, the images are reviewed to make sure they work. When everything looks good, the scene is put to film.
Final images are reviewed on a high-concentrated projector before translated to film.
After $1 billion at the box office, you can't argue with the result.
