Dinosaur Supervisor

Ahora que todo mundo está de nuevo interesado con el tema de Jurassic Park, aquí hay una interesante nota que leí al respecto de esta secuela iniciada por Spielberg y que revolucionó los efectos especiales en el cine. La historia es sobre uno de los animadores de stop motion más famosos de antaño (Phil Tippett), que aprovechó el cambio de lo análogo a lo digital en el mundo de los efectos especiales (CGI) para obtener uno de los puestos mas envidiables que se han conocido en la industria del cine: “Supervisor de Dinosaurios”.

Me alegra pensar que lo nuevo siempre se alimenta de lo viejo…

Spielberg assembled the Mount Rushmore of VFX — Stan Winston, Phil Tippett, Dennis Muren and Michael Lantieri — to bring dinosaurs to life for Universal Pictures’ adaptation of Michael Crichton’s book. The plan was to incorporate a blend of conventional techniques: full-scale mechanical dinos (like the T-rex at the paddock and the ailing triceratops) and high-speed miniatures (the running herds, many of the raptor shots).

At the time, Industrial Light and Magic was experimenting with computer-generated graphics, which it had used in the James Cameron films The Abyss and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. But CGI had only been used to make stylized liquid and metallic surfaces, not living, breathing creatures. Muren, who had been working with the technique at the Bay Area effects shop, suggested they give it a try, and created a short shot of T-rex running through a field.

“I’ve become extinct!” Tippett famously exclaimed, a line Spielberg liked so much he wrote it into an exchange between Drs. Alan Grant and Ian Malcolm…

But Tippett had learned an extraordinary amount about paleontology, the physicality of dinosaurs and the movements of animals for Jurassic Park and his previous dinosaur short films. Though the creatures’ bodies were being moved from his fingertips to computer screens, Tippett knew how they were supposed to look and behave. He had a new role: dinosaur supervisor…

http://on.mash.to/1G8TGHW

Things with feathers

AquÍ una imagen de un dinosaurio recientemente descubierto (C Changyuraptor yangi), que tenia 4 alas de las cuales 2 estaban es sus piernas. Supongo que evolutivamente, las 2 de abajo comenzaron a ser cada ves menos necesarias, hasta llegar a las aves como las conocemos. La paleo-artista que lo compartió tiene su propio Tumblr, del que saco el título de este post…

http://bit.ly/ZxIk38

ewilloughby:

Changyuraptor yangi is a newly-described microraptorine dromaeosaur dinosaur from the early Cretaceous (Yixian formation) of Liaoning, China.

The animal would have been around 4 feet long in life, and its fossil shows that it was covered in feathers — including, as in its smaller cousin Microraptor, a pair of “leg wings” represented by long paired pennaceous feathers on the metatarsals and tibiotarsus. One of Changyuraptor’s most unique features is its voluminous tail feathers, and these feathers constitute the longest of any known non-avian dinosaur, with the most distal retrices reaching around 30 cm in length.

Changyuraptor is also by far the largest “four-winged” dinosaur known, and while this might not be as big of a deal as it sounds (given that there aren’t very many “four-winged” dinosaurs), it does show that small size wasn’t necessarily the gatekeeper to certain volant adaptations. I personally doubt that this animal was doing anything approaching powered flight, but the long tail feathers and multiple sets of long, well-developed lifting surfaces may have been a boon to gliding and controlled descent. The exceptionally long tail feathers therefore might have been used as a sort of “pitch control” device, wherein a large, relatively heavy animal would have needed especially fine-tuned control over rapid falls onto prey or in safe landings from higher ground. As Buzz Lightyear would say, “This isn’t flying, it’s falling with style!”

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Gouache paint on A3-size hot-pressed illustration board, approx. 5-6 hours.

Gang Han et al. 2014. “A new raptorial dinosaur with exceptionally long feathering provides insights into dromaeosaurid flight performance”. Nature Communications. 5: 4382.