D.I.G. :How did you develop textures for skins that are not found fossilized? What was the rationale for the textures?

D.H.: I've partly answered this question already but color was a major factor too. There's no fossil evidence of dinosaur color whatsoever. So it's all down to speculation. I looked at living animals for inspiration - reptiles, birds and mammals.  Some people have argued against a mammalian  type  of coloration as dinosaurs were reptiles, but I think that dinosaurs weren't strictly speaking true reptiles. They evolved from reptiles and retained many of those characteristics, but they also evolved a mammalian type gait and other features non reptilian, so influences other than reptilian are valid. One thing that I observed is that the body size, environment & lifestyle of an animal has a direct bearing on it's coloration. Large animals tend to have a dull coloration, brighter color & pattern being reserved for small, tropical, animals like lizards & parrots. Those are the rules  in the modern world so it's safe to assume that the same applied to  prehistoric fauna. (Fauna... that's animals. Nothing to do with Bambi... Vera)

I designed the big guys like Diplodocus and T. rex using muted colours, bright colour would be a real scale buster, you wouldn't believe it so readily. There was room for a more creative use of color in smaller animals, though I tried to keep it sensible, blue isn't a common colour in nature so I used it sparingly, only as a sexual display feature - for instance Tapejara has blue cheeks, Hypsilophodon a blue head. Another way to make an interesting skin is to use pattern . Pattern can actually be more striking than than vivid color. It's the contrasts that catch the eye. I gave Utahraptor a bold pattern because he's an ambush predator, so camouflage is important. Also they are  depicted as pack hunters so I designed a slightly different pattern on each of the heads to differentiate between them. It would have helped them to recognize each other at a glance, important in a hierarchical group structure. The colors are a muted yellowy / tan with black & white markings. These colors mirrored the lichen that was growing on the rocks in the location that the sequence was filmed in.

D.I.G. What resolution did you work at for this show? TV is usually at a lower rez that film.Can you describe the differences?

D.H.:  TV is indeed at a lower resolution than film. This is kind of a mixed blessing. It makes the whole process of generating images easier. The cinema screen is huge so the image contains a lot more detail. To render at film resolution requires some serious computer power. Even at TV resolution it took us a long time to render the  close up shots.("render" is a computer graphics term, loosely it means the computer's generation of the images using the info we give it - the model, paint job, lighting, animation etc.)

I painted the textures at about six thousand pixels across, (eighteen thousand for Diplodocus as he was all neck and  tail).(For comparison, the jpeg image below is only 233 pixels across.)   These were then reduced when applied to the models to make them more manageable.  That's the frustrating part for me as a lot of my painted detail gets  lost.

 D.I.G. Is color a factor in skin texture? Or is this added in simply by a change in palette in the software?

Color is all hand-painted separately from the texture. Both are equally important. They work together to create the illusion of a real skin surface. Without color the model would look lifeless, an animal's skin contains all sorts of subtle variations of pigment plus mud & dirt. The texture stops the skin from looking flat & smooth, all the scales, skin folds & wrinkles are derived from the texture map.

D.I.G.  What software, in fact, did you use?

D.H.:  I used Photoshop. It means that I had to paint the skins as many two dimensional images and then wrap them onto the model. This is a pretty awkward
way of working but there are no 3D paint packages available that offer the painting facilities of Photoshop. It's image manipulation tools are excellent.

D.I.G. Who was on your team (if any) to do skin texture?

D.H.:  I was the only skin texture artist for most of the project, however, when the deadline suddenly came foreward , I worked it out that I had to paint two dinosaurs a week!  So I brought in some help from a friend of mine,  Danny Geurtsen, who painted some of the animals. ( Anatotitan, Plateosaurus, Peteinosaurus & Cynodont). Once the skins were painted, they were handed over to David Marsh, our modeler & technical director, who applied them to the models using the 3D package Softimage. We have since expanded the texture painting team with the arrival of new projects.

D.I.G.  At what point is the texture added?

D.H.:  After the moquettes (Little solid models of the dinosaur... Vera)  have been scanned and the computer models built. This happens at the same time as the animations are being done.

D.I.G.  Were the textures developed early in the development process for the series?

D.H.:  I began designing the color schemes early on but it was an ongoing process  that ran throughout production. I would alternate between designing &  painting. It worked out quite well as it was nice to take a break from  painting to concentrate on designing & then switch back again.

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