Recreating Jurassic Park In Blender

foreign today I want to talk about how I recreated the T-Rex Escape scene from Jurassic Park this was by far the most ambitious thing I've ever attempted in blender not only from a technical point of view but also the fact that this is a really iconic scene from a Beloved movie that's often praised for the quality of its VFX so the bar was set very high this whole project was an exercise in problem solving and the problem started right at the beginning in order to recreate an image or a video you really need to know the focal length of the camera and you need to know the scale and the position of different objects in the scene but I don't know either of those things about this shot normally I'd use this free tool called f spy which you can use to figure out the focal length of an image but that requires you to have two nice sets of parallel lines say the top and bottom of a wall and the top bottom of another wall I didn't have anything like this in the original footage the wall that goes around the bottom of the fence is actually curved so those lines aren't properly parallel and that would cause problems so the next idea was to use motion tracking instead in blender we can track points as they move around the screen then we can use that tracking data to work out the focal length of the camera and the position of those tracking points relative to each other everything that we need in theory but in order for that to happen we have to have a shot that has good Parallax Parallax is the optical effect when you move a camera around the things which are closest to the camera seem to move more around the screen than things in the distance for instance the toy here at the front moves from left to right of the frame whereas the toy in the back hardly moves at all it basically stays in the middle of the shot the original shot from Jurassic Park was shot on a camera that didn't actually move around in 3D space it tilts and pans but the camera remains in a fixed position so we have no Parallax information and frankly there's nothing good in the background to track anyway the fence posts move around and so do the trees so then my final solution was just to eyeball it if I could get the measurements of the car online I could line up a car model with the shot and I could use that to figure out what the probable focal length was and the position of the car relative to the camera in theory if I do everything right all the other stuff should line up so that brings me to problem number two I needed a really good accurate model of the car if you've never tried to model a car before I suggest you just keep it that way modeling a car is notoriously difficult for a bunch of reasons the reference images that you can find online are almost always inaccurate car body work has all these really subtle curves and shapes that you have to nail or the car just won't look right and if you have any problems with your topology it will show up because the metallic car Shader there's no shortage of good car models online personally I really like this car Library add-on called traffic I'll leave a link to that in the description it's got a really decent range of cars to choose from and they're all fantastic quality too funnily enough it didn't have a 1992 Ford Explorer which is the vehicle I need I did manage to find the cad model of one online and I intended originally to use that as the base mesh but the topology was really bad once I converted it to quads and I had all sorts of other weird problems I started stripping away all the bad parts of the mesh and I basically just ended up up with this like burnt out shell of a car and by this point I figured look I might as well just make this whole thing from scratching by the bullet so I did and it was horrible I spent a good few days on this thing mostly just trying to get the basic shape to look right none of this process was particularly interesting to be honest so I'm just going to skip it in this video things did start to get much more interesting though once I added the modifications to turn the Explorer into the Jurassic Park car I found this absolutely fantastic reference site called jpmortapool.com which is made for people who are modifying real Ford Explorers to look like the Jurassic Park Model it had a huge wealth of information about all the modifications that were made in the movie everything from the exact paint colors to the brand and model of the lights speaking of Lights the headlights were actually really simple but I thought they looked very good I just added an image of some actual lights in the blender and then I used that as the bump input of a glass Shader that gave you the nice textured glass effect then I placed inside the glass in a mission plane and you can even play around with the ior of the glass to make it look like it has different depths to the bulb I managed to save a whole bunch of time just by cannibalizing one of the models from the traffic add-on the whole anterior of the car the wiper blades and the Tigers for the whales were all made from this nice SUV model I found I also quickly just projected from the side an image of the car paint under the side of the actual car just so I'd get an idea of how this looked obviously I was going to go in later on and paint the whole thing properly I noticed at this point that I had some weird shading issues with the mesh which was probably my fault somewhere along the line I managed to fix that just by slabbing the weighted normal modifier on which works by Magic presumably 90 of the time if I have some weird shading issues I can just use this modifier and I'll fix it all up I did start to do a proper UV on wrap on this thing but halfway through I just thought screw I wonder if the smart protection will look fine and it did a really nice UV map doesn't matter so much when you text your painting because the paint should just cover up all the seams as long as though you don't have any overlapping UV islands and there's no stretching in the map it should be fine it is a little bit lazy but by this point I was really sick of modeling this car and I just wanted to move on so the last thing I had to do was paint the car which was surprisingly pain free it probably took less than an hour in toll the boils over at JP motor pool actually supplied the exact hex cords for the shades of paint which was fantastic so I just made a gradient in the texture paint tools and then I used the fill tool to draw the gradient where I wanted on the side of the car JP motor pull also had all the decals and the logos for the sides in the front of the car the only thing that had a hand paint was the stripes of color around the sides of the car in blender you can add a texture as a stencil and then you can paint that image right onto the mesh if you have a color selected like I'm using red higger it'll paint in different shades of red but if you have a white brush selected you'll get the actual original colors of the graphic if your graphics aren't in a perfect square ratio they will get a little bit distorted but you can fix that just by hitting the aspect ratio button in the settings so at this point the car was done and I was feeling pretty confident about the whole project until I realized that the next step was to model rig and animate a bloody T-Rex something I had no idea how to do originally I planned to model the T-Rex from scratch but I'd lost so much time on the car I decided to just find some sort of Base mesh on the internet I also did some hunting around and I managed to find screenshots of the actual T-Rex model from the movie from loads of different viewpoints which served as a fantastic reference for the proportions of the Rex I found this model on sketchfab by avenas which was actually pretty complete and it matched incredibly well with the reference images it served as a really nice base mesh for sculpting and it even had a rake though I did remove the rigs I knew I'd be making my own later on the mesh was made up from all triangles so I used the Trident quad command and I applied a multi-res modifier so I could start sculpting the multi-res modifier is basically like a layer system for topology it allows you to subdivide a match a load of times and get all the really nice details but you can always go back down to lower subdivision levels and make changes to the base mesh without messing up all the other levels I prefer to use the Multiverse modifier if I've got a really nice base mesh to work on because unlike Dynamic topology it keeps all of the original topology intact which means it doesn't mesh up your textures or UV Islands so the basic process for sculpting this out was just to sculpt in all the major shapes like the large muscles and the ribs then I subdivided the mesh and I went to work on the medium details like the ridges on the foot and the skin folds then I subdivided it a few more times so I could add in all the really fine details like the scales I want to give a quick shout out here to Stan Winston School of character Arts it's an online special effects girl run by loads of the guys who created the original dinosaur models for Jurassic Park their website and YouTube channel was a pretty invaluable source of behind the scenes footage for me and I used it a lot when I was sculpting and painting the T-Rex trying to sculpt this thing from a few dark movie Stills wouldn't have been very fun at all sculpting details like scales and wrinkles and blender is actually really easy you can just load in a texture as a brush and then you can paint that texture straight onto the mesh Pixel Logic the company which makes zbrush has this massive library of free Alpha textures on their website once the sculpt was complete I baked out a cavity map in blender which I could use later on to make the Shader look a bit better cavity map is basically just a texture which highlights all the dark areas in between the scales and the wrinkles then I baked out the top level of the multi-res modifier as a normal map that way I could apply the normal map to the original base mesh and it would have all the nice details that I just sculpted on even though it's a much lower resolution which makes it faster to animate with and it makes it faster to render there's a really good tutorial by shutter Authority where he goes through this whole process step by step so I won't bother just reiterating what he says I suggest you check that out if you want to know how to do this stuff it's on the Nvidia studio YouTube channel I'll leave a link to it in the description I forgot to record most of the painting process but there's not a lot going on here it's basically just a simple scale texture and I painted on with a simple brush some of the variation in color like around the chest and underneath the neck so once again at this point I'm looking at the work I've done and I'm like yep I'm pretty happy with how this has gone then I remembered I still have to rig and animate this damn thing now for reference I've only ever rigged and animated one set of characters before and that was those Ducks from the last video which didn't exactly look great this so I don't have a lot of experience here is what I'm saying I used the rigify add-on to make the rig rigifies a free add-on it actually comes with blending you just have to install it in the preferences now I don't have any experience at all with rigifying to be honest it's still a bit of a mystery to me but after some trial and error I managed to come up with a half decent control rig once I did a little bit of manual weight painting so I couldn't start animating the T-Rex until I built out the rest of the scene since it interacts with things like the fence so I made one concrete base for the fence and then I used the curve modifier and the array just to repeat it around the whole track but when you array an object you often get some really obvious repetition in the textures since every object in the array is identical like the scratch Mark here you can see in the same place on every point you can fix that really easily just by adding in object info node into the Shader and then you can connect the random output into the location input of a mapping node you can also change the distribution of the texture just by adding in a math node and cranking up the second number until you get a nice result to make all the trees I used another one of my favorite add-ons called botanic it's a total Lifesaver here because I really didn't fancy modeling a load of trees that are going to be barely visible anywhere in the same and the cool thing about the botanic trees is that most of them come with a pre-made animation for different levels of wind so I could just play an animation to that add a few trays to the same and the whole thing was done I'll leave a link to botanic in the description if you do lots of outdoor scenes I definitely suggest you pick a copy up so with a few botanic trees planted in the scene it was almost time to start animating but first I just wanted to nail the Rainy look of the original shot I found this really nice rainy window Shader online and with a few tweaks it looked really great on the glass I originally planned to use some real volumetrics in this scene but it was massively increasing the render times and it was causing loads of noise in the render so I swapped out the principal Shader just for a low strength emission Shader it looked like 80 as good and render times were cut in half so it's pretty good trade-off I didn't really record any of the animation process but trust me you're not missing out on anything interesting it was basically just two days of trial and error now it did seem like it was going really slowly but then I found out that this original walk cycle animation took the guys at ilm a month to figure out so I wasn't too worried about two days especially considering that this is basically my first proper animation that's not too bad so what it did is I had the original shot in the camera as the background and I just worked backwards through the shot and I tried to line up the T-Rex at certain keyframes the best I could I knew that I wouldn't be able to get an exact match with the original plate for various reasons I wasn't too worried about trying to match it exactly as long as I got the same sort of feel of the motion I was happy with it I just wanted to nail the essence of the shot once all the major movements were blocked in I went back through the whole animation and I started animating all these subtle little gestures like the fact that she shifts her weight a little bit when she steps up onto the platform or when she moves forward her head kind of follows afterwards and Bobs a little bit when she walks stuff like that just adds a lot more sense of weight to the scene it stops you from getting this really like floaty animation so with the character animation done that brings us to probably the biggest headache of the whole project the bloody cables don't get us wrong the cables on the side were fairly easy they were fiddly and they're time consuming but they weren't difficult I basically just made a lot of Curves gave them some thickness convert them into a mesh and then I applied a cloth Sim and I used PIN groups and hook modifiers to make it stick to the fence that part was nice and easy the real problem came when I had to make these cables that actually snap when the T-Rex bites through it now at the very start of this project I made like a little proof of concept animation I thought to myself can you make cable that snaps just by running a cloth Sim now the point where it snaps swap it out for an identical copy of the same mesh and then run another club Sim but this time with it broken too and it worked here's the animation it worked fine but when I actually tried to do it in the real scene with a T-Rex actually moving all of the cables and all the other things hook modifiers it was a nightmare I'm gonna describe the process for one cable just so you can feel my pain I run a claw simulation on the cable and I selected the frame where I wanted the snap to occur you can't make a duplicate of a mesh mid simulation so I had to apply the closet as a shape case on that frame but I copy the motion I pasted it into a different version of blender I removed the base Escape key from the duplicate so now the duplicate matches the shape of the original then it went back into the original blender file and I undid the application of the car simulation of the shape key then I paste it in the new duplicate so now I've got two measures I've got one with the colossium and I've got a duplicate without it put on one single frame they're both the exact same shape a keyframe the render visibility of the original cable so that it would disappear at the same time the other duplicate would reappear then it went in edit mode on the duplicate and I displayed up into two different pieces I re-added the hook modifiers to this duplicate then around the cost simulation again which would start on the frame where the snap was going to occur I had to make the properties of the cloth simulation a little bit elastic otherwise the cables would move out the way of the T-Rex in time and I wanted to make them look like they're kind of snapping with a little bit of energy anyway I had to repeat that process about six or seven times like I said it was a nightmare so thankfully at this point it was almost time to hit render but first I just wanted to make one or two more tweaks to the Rain effects the original shot has these two splashes when the Tyrannosaurus foot hits the ground so I quickly just made the splash animation by dropping a cube into some liquid I didn't know if this was going to stay in the final render or not when I was making it but I was actually surprised with how good it looked the final rendering was done with just one pass and a little bit of compositing I just used a blur node to remove some of the sharpness I used a glare node to blow out the lights a little bit and there was a little bit of color correction as well other than that you're basically looking at the raw render for the final animation I'm not sure how long the total render time was for this to be honest because I just set it away and went to the pub it was about 50 seconds per frame using cycle X so I'm gonna guess it was probably about five hours overall I'm actually really happy with how this turned out I mean it's far from perfect but to be honest it's better than I expected it to be especially for my first animation project I was really happy with how this came out I do plan to recreate a lot of other movie scenes in blender in the future I already have a few ideas jot down but if there's any scenes you would specifically like to see leave it in the comments and you never know what might just happen thanks for watching I'll see you soon with another video

Channel: DECODED

Views: 16,611,072

Keywords: DECODED, Blender, Blender tutorial, Blender for beginners, Online training, VFX, Jurassic Park, Jurassic World, T-rex, Movie recreation, Jurassic park CGI, Jurassic park cars

Id: xpwvrWoxeqI

Length: 17min 21sec (1041 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 14 2021