Before the 90’s visual effects in films were made up of mostly stop motion and people in suits. even though animation was used in star wars and tron and in title sequences like the superman film in 1978. It wasn’t until terminator 2 in 1991 and jurassic park in 1993 that movies used a lot of CGI and also mixed it with live action. There are in total only 14 minutes of dinosaur visual effects in jurassic park about 4 of which were made with a computer but its effect on the movie community had a lasting impact.
How was CGI used in jurassic park?
1. The dinosaurs were drawn out as best as they could with labels for each joint, Steve ‘spaz’ Williams worked on the T-Rex primarily, this is a T Rex drawing by Williams used to figure out where joints on the dinosaur would go.
2. The renderings had to make their way on to the computer. The team created models of the dinosaurs that they drew below is a model for the T Rex, the model of the T Rex is only 5 feet high, Williams explained it like its the opposite of a 3D printer, because it takes the object and turns it into data.
“In order to get it into the computer we actually had to fire a laser at the three dimensional rubber prosthetic model and extract the data so the computer had it essentially”, said Williams
3.They then reconstructed the data in order to make it work in the computer. below are 2 images of the T Rex data from Williams monitor, they used a software called alias.
4. after the computer has all the models for the dinosaurs the then used a piece of software called SoftImage 3D, this software then took the wire frames and figured out where all the joint placements on the dinosaurs were so that the animators could very easily animate it without having to sort out all the joints by hand.
5. After that, the data had to be ‘rigged’ with a digital armature in wire frames. This is 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 refused the run data for the rest of the Jeep-chase shots and ultimately for the following 2 movies”
6.Next the dinosaurs get their skin, “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 it 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 wire frame. that’s all being done in computer,” says Williams. “It pretty much took 10 hours to calculate one frame, you have to remember the 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
Williams also animated all 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. So in total this small clip took 900 hours to render, that is equivalent too 37.5 days.
“I animated all those shots where the T Rex is chasing the Jeep. it took me four months to animate it, just to get the running to work properly,” says Williams.
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 is the final shot with the added dinosaurs
9. Once its 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.
All together, Williams says it took about a year to bring dinosaurs to life.
“basically may of 1992 to may of 1993 was the entire build and composite time for probably 40 shots,” says Williams.
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