This project was a lot of fun for me to do. I originally got into 3D because of Jurassic Park, and have always loved Dinosaurs. I hadn’t even sent my showreel out yet, so it surprised me when Detour Films called me up and offered me money to work on a Dinosaur project. The company who output my reel to video really liked my work and so passed a copy of it on to Detour who contacted me that week.

This was more of a learning experience than anything else. I was the only 3D animator in the company, working directly under the Emmy award winning traditional character animator, Dwayne Labbe. Dwayne taught me more than I could absorb in the short time I was with him. We contracted out the trees to a Maya operator while I modeled, textured, rigged and animated all of the dinosaurs for this scene. Apart from the trees done in Maya, all work was done by DJ Nicke. I closely followed guide animation provided by Dwayne Labbe for the smaller Dinosaurs (Leallynosaurus) and the Sauropods. Afterburn was used for the fog, and After Effects was used to composite in a few extra trees.

This version is not the final render. There are a few problems with the fog, and I am sure you will notice a problem with the Pteranodon flying halfway across the screen and then dissapearing. I have not been able to get a copy of the final work off of the museum yet. Since this animation takes 1 ½ weeks to render on a dual 550 with 512 mb ram, I decided to just post this version for now.

Dino.avi This is the 20 second clip which took me several weeks to complete.

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