Workshops

Greg DESIGNING
A DINOSAUR
Broadmore
COUNTRY: New Zealand

Greg is a
conceptual

FOR FILM
designer and
illustrator. He
uses digital
and traditional media,
and has worked on films
including King Kong,
Tintin and I, Robot.
www.gregbroadmore.
com
Greg Broadmore, senior concept designer for Weta
Workshop, explains the process of designing and
DVD Assets
The files you need illustrating a dinosaur to be used as a 3D film asset…
are on your DVD in
Workshop Files>Greg
Broadmore. Download
a trial version of
Photoshop from www.
adobe.com/downloads

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 In depth Designing a dinosaur for film

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 Workshops
Photoshop is
simple…
Actually, it’s massively
layered and complex,
but it doesn’t have to be.
Just use the functions
you understand for the
majority of your work.
Use trial and error to find
out what other things do.
I think it’s easy to get
hung up on the depth of
a program like this and
assume that you should
be using all those tricks.
You shouldn’t.
86
UNI29.concept_dino 86
rawing is easy. Typing out your
D thoughts on how you
designed a pretend dinosaur
is not… One thing I’m going
to try to do as little of as possible is give
you technical tips on how to operate
Photoshop – what Multiply layers do and
that sort of stuff. That’s the easy stuff that
you can find out through trial and error
like I did. The hard part is explaining the
intuitive realisation of an image. I do have
a few technical tricks that I use though,
and I’ll try and shed some light on those
as they apply to the images.
My brief was to create a dinosaur
concept in 2D that could be modelled,
textured and animated in 3D for 3D
World Magazine by my fellow Weta artist,
the extremely talented Steve Lambert.
He’ll be doing the other half – or maybe
I should say other 90 per cent – of this
tutorial in that magazine(see
page 89). He got the hard
job. (To put his job into context,
April 2008
Weta Workshop
employed several
world-class traditional
sculptors for six months
just to create the scannable
maquette of one of the three
V. rexes in King Kong. That
was followed by more than a
year’s work by who knows how
many Weta Digital artists
building, muscle-rigging,
texturing, lighting, animating and
etcetering the digital model for the
big screen. Steve’s doing the whole
thing for these workshops in about a
month! Ha ha, poor fool!)
Every dinosaur needs a name.
I made up a bunch using a Latin
dictionary, a complete lack of
understanding of Latin and a bottle of
tequila. Most of them meant ‘murder
lizard’, or ‘violence horn’, or ‘laser combat
warlord’, or something like that. I decided
on Atrocitasaurus for this guy, which in
my estimation means ‘cruel reptile’. Cool.
IInitial concepts
1 The first question was what sort
T
of dinosaur will this be? Steve and I talk
about it and decide initially that it’s going
The first sketches were done with
pencil on paper to really nail the to be a quadrupedal ceratopsid, like
concept of the dinosaur. Styracosaurus or Triceratops. Then Steve
thinks that a therapod (like T-rex) with a
ceratopsid-like head could be interesting.
I draw several thumbnails, some
featured here, toying
with the neck shield
and a serrated
interlocking beak, and
quickly realise it’s too
obvious a mish-mash
and come back to a
more predatory skull.
I love Galapagos
Iguanas with their
knotty outcrops so I
give it a gnarled
looking crest on its
snout. It could be used
aggressively in
territorial clashes, as a
signifier of dominance,
or for stabbing a
futuristic space marine –
that sort of thing.
22/2/08 1:34:16 pm
 In depth Designing a dinosaur for film

Left: The head is the biggest point of visual

interest in the dinosaur, so Greg drew this and
quickly fleshed it out using Photoshop.

Below: To make sure the striding pose was right,

Greg experimented with two different drawings
and opted for the latter.

The
T head
2 The
T most important thing for Steve
to get on with – and the biggest point of
visual interest in the dinosaur– is the
head. I draw a side-on
sketch and quickly
flesh this out using simple
Multiply layers and a few
opaque brush strokes. This
gives a very rough volume
and form. As I go forward I
give it an olive base colour
and add some detail as
well as solidifying the
form. I then add a
background texture so
my highlights will register,
and darken the keratinous Naturalistic pose
horned parts of the head. 3 I want to render the animal in a running or striding pose, so I
Finally, I paint in a vaguely do ttwo drawings and pick the latter to work from. I liked the first one
striped organic pattern and but it looked like it was decelerating or turning, so I have the second
accentuate its edges (a bit one with its mouth open, going at what would probably be full clip for
more on this later). In an animal of that size (I imagine it’s roughly the size of an Allosaurus).
addition, I colour grade the These are both fairly rough drawings with not a lot more detail than I
image using Selective would normally include in a pencil sketch. I try to leave the detail for
Colour, making the the Photoshop illustration.
highlights cool and the I purposely make the dinosaur classically reptilian in most aspects.
shadows warm. How’s that This is partly an aesthetic choice, and partly because feathers would
for counter-intuitive? make Steve’s job even more ridiculous.

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 Workshops
Quick Mask
I didn’t use this while
making this image, but
it’s a great feature so I
though I’d mention it.
Two little boxes with
circles in ’em, side by
side at the bottom of the
toolbox. Click the right
one and you’re in Mask
mode. Paint into this
layer with any brush, use
any filter on those pixels
– Blur, Adjust Levels,
Transform… whatever.
Now click on the left one
and you have a selection.
I really should use that
thing more often.
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UNI29.concept_dino 88
Them bones
4 FFor every dinosaur that we
designed on King Kong we made detailed
bone drawings to aid Weta Digital, and as
Steve has to rig and animate the dinosaur
that I’m designing here, I decide to do the
same thing, to help him out.
The above is a rough idea of the
location and form of the bones – nothing
too analytical or fancy, but hopefully it
will serve its purpose and make his job a
little bit easier. I work from good reference
and suggest this reference to Steve,
namely the drawings of paleo-artist
Gregory S Paul, whose work is a constant
inspiration to me.
One of the features apparent in this
drawing is the unusual clipped tail. A
therapod dinosaur uses its tail to counter-
balance and aid in direction change, so Final illustration: Pencils and basic colour
shortening the tail is a weird design 5 After
A scanning my pencils into Photoshop, I multiply them against each other
choice, but it looks pretty darn good, so I and soften
f some of those layers with a Blur or Noise filter. Once I have the pencils dark
think why not? enough I quickly wash over some base colour, using both regular and Multiply layers. I
To make up for the lack of length, I set one colour layer to Lighten, which makes the black line work an orange/red. At this
decide to add heavy tail scutes that the stage I just want to get some colour and value down, a base level to work the highlights
creature could also use defensively. The and shadows off. It’s pretty loose really, something that will be added to at a later stage.
bone diagram omits the middle row so I also lighten the dinosaur’s underbelly, which is a natural camouflage phenomenon
as to show the tail vertebrae. that occurs with creatures in the wild.
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 In depth Designing a dinosaur for film
The pattern
9 I roughly sketch the striped pattern
on a Multiply Layer that follows the
horned scutes across the body and break
that up a little with a small Eraser,
keeping it irregular. I then duplicate the
layer and filter that again with Find Edges,
adjusting the colour of the result. I mix
these layers and Midtone Dodge them to
follow the overall lighting on the body.

Basic form
B Detail
6 8
Now that I have some colours in
N Now the most laborious and
place and a base value to work with, I start
to define the form. I work up a general
ambient shading to the body, using
Multiply, and Overlay layers to give form
from diffuse overhead light. At this stage I
haven’t really decided where the major
light source is but I’ve decided that the
background will be light, so I can roll a
glancing light around the creature’s form.
I also decide to put a lot of bounce light
on the dinosaur’s underside to give form
to the chest, belly and pubic bone.
FROM PAGE
TO SCREEN
Grab a copy of 3D
World’s latest issue to
see this dino come alive
Greg’s concept image looks
fantastic, but it has one drawback:
it can’t move! Fortunately, help is
at hand. In issue 102 of 3D World,
Steve Lambert, Animation
perhaps most cathartic part of the Director at Weta
illustration. I add secondary forms to the Productions, explains how
to turn Greg’s artwork into
original brushstrokes, and elaborate parts
a walking, talking (okay,
of the image that the textures have snarling) 3D animation.
accentuated. I tidy up the silhouette a Using ZBrush, Steve shows
little and detail scales, folds and areas of you how to block out the 3D
model, sculpt in the fine
the body that are highly articulated, such details and paint on realistic
as the hands and joints. This sort of detail skin textures. After that, it’s
will hopefully inform Steve during the over to the 3D software
package Maya, where Steve
fine modelling, texturing and colouring explains how get the
parts of his job. By this point I’ve decided dinosaur in motion, setting
on the exact light source. up a real film production-
style character rig,
keyframing a basic walk
cycle and rendering out the
finished animation. This
special 21-page project
includes complete step-by-step
guides for each of the key stages
of the process, while the
magazine’s DVD includes more
than seven hours of screen capture
footage to help you through the
tricky sections, plus all of Steve’s
project files for you to load in and
experiment with. Issue 102 of 3D
World is on sale at the same time
as this issue of ImagineFX, or you

0 cLast-ditch
can buy a copy online from www.
10 cheap tricks myfavouritemagazines.co.uk.

The image is done, but I just don’t know

it yet. I play around more and more until
I realise I’m not adding anything
worthwhile to the overall result. I make a
copy of the entire image and perform a
Textures
T quick little trick on it: Sharpen Edges.
7 Ippaint traditionally – paper, canvas and impasto art materials can give you great How cheap. I tweak the image a little
texture
t ffor free. I use photo textures for this same kind of natural breakup in a digital more and then snap out of it. I go and
image. I use brushes with Dual Brush turned on to get a similar variability. Here, I’ve play some BioShock.
added Rusty Splatter texture for that reason and used a mosaic tile as a basis for Throughout this process I’ve been
dinosaur scales. To get the mosaic to be useful as scales (or the suggestion of them) I updating Steve with work in progress
use the Dust and Scratches filter and then add that new layer again on top of itself set
to Multiply, and then apply the Find Edges filter. I tile the resulting texture organically
shots and now, for me, the exciting part
really starts: seeing the creature take
ON SALE
over the body and set both layers to Overlay. shape in 3D. NOW!
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