Dan's JP3 Page - Old news - 7/30/00

The Lost World
By Michael Crichton
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August 13, 2001

On SFX
A Silicon Graphics press release extolls the wonder of their fancy "Origin Family Servers", which they say contributed to the special effects for "five of the summer's biggest blockbuster films." On JP3, they have this to say:

Model development at ILM of Jurassic Park III began well over a year ago. ILM then completed more than 400 2D and 3D effects shots using Silicon Graphics O2 workstations, primarily running Softimage for animation. The flesh simulation application within an ILM proprietary dynamics engine, originally developed for The Mummy and written on the O2 systems, was adapted for dinosaur skin simulation. Some of the ``creatures,'' as ILM's Tim McLaughlin, creature supervisor for Jurassic Park III calls the dinosaurs, were based on the designs of the previous films while some were new or totally rebuilt. More than 60 shots featured flesh or cloth simulations (used, for example, for the pteranodon's wings).
``There were a half-dozen hero-style creatures and another five or six that were used in background shots,'' McLaughlin said. ``T-rex, which was prominently featured in both Jurassic Park and The Lost World, came back for a cameo in Jurassic Park III. We had to take a look at the dinosaur in terms of how it was structured: what its patch structure was, what its chaining rig (animation control) was, and how it needed to perform in the new movie. We knew we wanted to do flesh simulation -- flesh, bone and muscle -- on most of the featured creatures. We had to resurface the entire T-rex, using what we had originally created on SGI systems as the basis of a template, and then repainted and rerigged the creature.''
One of the many complex CGI scenes that demanded the performance of both the Silicon Graphics O2 visual workstations and ILM's array of SGI 2000 series servers for rendering is the dinosaur fight sequence, featuring the T-rex and an all-new spinosaurus. ``This scene needed two huge CGI creatures doing a Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier imitation,'' said McLaughlin. ``The chance to work on the choreography and what I call the environmental effects -- the way the skin of the animals moves, how the trees and bushes and dust around them react to their movements and making everything have the right scale and physical dynamics -- was truly an exciting challenge.''

McLaughlin, who has worked at ILM for seven years, concluded, ``SGI systems are all I've ever worked on, and they work great for what I need to do. In Jurassic Park III, the complexity of what we were dealing with on a shot-by-shot basis is just amazing to me. The dinosaur models that we worked with are three times as heavy, in a geometric sense, as they were in The Lost World, and yet we were able to accomplish the production of the shots in a shorter time period.