Deep Dive into Fallen Kingdom's Incredible Jurassic VFX!

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Dinosaurs have fascinated us since we learned of their existence. They are alien and yet recognizable, mystical, but natural, Terrifying but comfortingly extinct. The Idea of bringing Dinosaurs back to life may seem like a nightmare to most but it's every VFX animator's "Dream come true".

Industrial Light and Magic.
A "Big budget" film generally means "Big Budget" VFX, and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is no different. A $170 million budget, of which about a third was spent on special effects.
ILM provided 1200 shots including "The trapped T.Rex", The new hybrid Indoraptor, stampede sequences, and 15 different dinosaurs including "Blue".

Blue
Blue is a Velociraptor that Owen, AKA Chris Pratt trains as a baby in the previous film "Jurassic World".
ILM animators referenced Blue's character and personality from the previous film and added aggression and distrust because Blue had been living in the wild since the last film.
For "Baby Blue" a Puppet was made for Chris to interact with and ILM animators added CGI enhancements to make it more realistic.
For "Adult Blue" A full CG model was made in addition to Animatronics. In close-up scenes where Blue was virtually motionless, for example, during the operating table scenes, a full-scale animatronic was on set. ILM then enhanced the performance adding more complexity of movement, such as extra throat movements, muscle firing, augmenting nostrils, eyes, and lip movements. This technique meant that contact between blue and the actors was real, all eyelines matched up and "Blue" looked like a real dinosaur.
For scenes where Blue was in motion, she's 100% CG.

Indoraptor
The Indoraptor is a hybrid based on Blues DNA but three times larger, it has longer arms that it can use in a more humanlike fashion and can walk on two legs or 4.
In almost every shot the Indoraptor is CG, although an Animatronic head, claws, and hands were made and performed by puppeteers.
This gave the actors something to interact with, the animators and lighting artists something to match, and helped the director and camera operators with "framing".
In a scene that will probably give nightmares to generations of children to come, the Velociraptor "Blue" and the Indoraptor have a fight inside a kids bedroom.
This scene was especially complicated because when animating two large creatures fighting in a small space, it's hard to keep the illusion of "Weight". Toys may hit the wall and fall to the floor but when a dinosaur hits the wall, the room has to move too!

Tyrannosaurus Rex
Using ILM's Digital files they 3D printed a full-size T.Rex head! to be used in the "Trapped T.Rex" scene. Putting it together was said to be like a massive dinosaur jigsaw puzzle.
During the scene, the "drugged T.Rex" begins to regain consciousness as Claire and Owen try not to wake it up. Here animators switched from practical to full CG as the T. Rex woke up, first by adding eye twitches and then slowly building until ramping up to full CG as it opens its mouth to attack.

Scanline
Scanline mostly worked on The Isla Nublar and the escape sequence and volcano eruption.

Isla Nublar
Scanline received concept artwork from ILM which gave them a basic idea of how it should look as well as framing and camera positions. Knowing that a lot of shots from the film were filmed in the Hawaiian islands they used these islands as references.
Texturing was done using Mari, Photoshop, and World Machine, World Machine gave them the advantage of being able to create displacement maps as well as textures, so they got textures fitting their geometry as well as their own textures, making for a much more convincing effect than just painting on the geometry.

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