"Five ton predators are hard to match"

Daren Horley - Senior 3D Artist bei Framestore CFC erzählt von seiner Leidenschaft für Dinosaurier und darüber, wie BodyPaint 3D dabei half, die neue TV-Serie 'Prehistoric Park' zu erschaffen (Interview in Englisch).

It was the TV series they said would be impossible to make, and it was Daren Horley's first CG job: 'Walking with Dinosaurs.' The series, of course, was to prove a gigantic success. Daren's career in the world of 3D was just taking off.

Since then Daren has worked on a huge variety of TV and film projects, including 'Superman Returns,' 'Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets' and 'The Last Dragon' (UK) / 'Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real' (US).

Now dinosaurs are back on the agenda - Daren headed the texture team at Framestore CFC to create stunning dinosaur skins with the help of BodyPaint 3D for the new CGI-fuelled TV series 'Prehistoric Park.'

How did you get started in the CG industry?
I was hired by Mike Milne here at Framestore CFC to work on the original 'Walking with Dinosaurs.' Mike was the Director of Computer Animation who took on the project that everyone said was impossible. Not only was he a brave man to take on that project, but also brave to hire me as, at that point, I had no CG experience.

When did you realise that digital painting was your forte?
In about 1994. I had a friend who was working as a graphic designer and he was using Photoshop. I was an illustrator working in airbrush, acrylics and oils at the time. I had never touched a computer before other than to play games. I asked him if he thought Photoshop was a tool that could be used to create a painting from scratch as opposed to photo retouching. He said no, but I gave it a shot anyway. It turned out he was wrong.

Did you find it easy to switch to digital painting?
Some traditional artists find the switch to digital difficult. Having used an airbrush, the move to a digital version was an easy step for me. It alleviated all the bad points of real painting and opened up a lot of new techniques. I can't believe I used to cut acetate film with a scalpel to create masks, and clean the airbrush every few minutes when it clogged.

The computer felt very liberating, I wasn't fighting with a coloured liquid anymore, it freed me up creatively. I'm glad I went through the traditional route though, it makes a better artist having done it the hard way. A bit like the way an athlete who trains with weights strapped to his legs, when he runs in the race without them he gives a better performance.

What kind of work did you do for Prehistoric Park?
I supervised the team of people that designed and painted the texture maps. We also did the matte painting and put together the promo images for print.

What types of things apart from dinosaurs do you texture with the help of BodyPaint 3D?
We have done a variety of work in TV, commercials and film: Trojan ships, space ships, all manner of buildings, dragons, squirrels, bears, flying horses, hippogriphs, mermaids, mutant demons, insects, fish...

What's the advantage of using a 3D paint tool such as BodyPaint 3D?
You can see accurately how the texture maps are going to react when applied to a 3D surface. Previously, I had worked purely in 2D, guessing how it would look. Only at render time would I see what was going on. It inevitably would need a lot of clean up and tweaking to finish off. Now I can confidently do about 90% of a texture paint before it goes to render testing.


Using a 3D paint tool takes the guesswork out of texturing: "You can see accurately how the texture maps are going to react when applied to a 3D surface." Image courtesy of Impossible Pictures/ITV/Framestore CFC.

How big are the textures you paint? Do you work to a higher resolution for film work than for TV?
An average size texture map is about 10,000 pixels across its longest side. We work the same for film and TV because often the client will ask for a tight close-up, so depending on how close that is it needs a lot of detail no matter what the size of the final frame. Also, we typically produce large promo stills for print along with the TV shows. These require renders at anything between 4,000 and 7,000 pixels.

How long does it take to texture a dinosaur?
It depends on what role it plays and in what show it appears, also what the deadlines are like. For TV, a quickie would be five days - most of the original 'Walking with' dinosaurs were done in five days each.

A hero creature would be about twenty days. A film creature would be more time. Maybe twenty days to paint it and another fifteen spent making changes. Film clients like to change their mind, and they have the budget to do so.

'Walking with Dinosaurs' was an amazing success. Why do you think it was so big and how did its success affect your career?
It was big because it was a very original idea. Dinosaurs had always been portrayed in a very dry, documentary, academic way with bearded men telling us how fast they may have ran, or how many vertebrae they had, interspliced with some very poorly financed stop frame or cell animation.

The other end of the spectrum was Hollywood pitting them against some extremely fit cavewomen fresh from a magazine photo shoot, or maybe the dinosaurs were being rounded up by some cowboys. Not that there's anything wrong with that, Ray Harryhausen did amazing work - he's one of the reasons why I chose to be where I am now.

Then of course there's 'Jurassic Park,' which is the other reason. 'Walking With' took a new angle on it and portrayed dinosaurs as animals not monsters, but kept the drama by pretending it was a wildlife film-maker that was actually there - a brilliant idea. Also, the BBC/Discovery Channel put up some real money in order to make it work. A tiny fraction of the JP budget, but still better than any previous TV show of that nature. It changed my career completely as it was my break into the world of visual effects.

What has been the most challenging project to work on in your career so far?
A TV show called 'Ocean Odyssey', by far. It would be easy to assume that film work is more challenging because it is more than double the resolution of TV and a Hollywood director is more exacting than a TV director. Not so. Our texture maps are equally detailed no matter what medium it's intended for.

'Ocean Odyssey,' however, involved not just the texturing of various sea creatures, but the creation of previously unseen, undersea terrain through matte paintings. The premise of the show was to reveal, through a fictional piece of camera technology, a factual world that, in reality, is impossible to see because it's obscured by the ocean. Pinning down a look for all the different locations was extremely difficult. It also had a schedule to make your eyes water.

What do you enjoy most about what you do? What do you enjoy least?
I enjoy the design process and the painting of the colour maps. Matte painting is also a nice change to the routine. It feels more like illustration as you are painting a scene as opposed to an animal pelt. I don't like painting bump maps. They are essential but really dull. It helps to listen to music whilst doing them.


"I don't like painting bump maps. They are essential but really dull." Image courtesy of Impossible Pictures/ITV/Framestore CFC.

What features do you like most in BodyPaint 3D?
I like the projection paint mode. It's really good for fixing seams in the UV maps by painting across them. It's also good if there is some distortion in the UV space - projection mode allows you to paint happily regardless. I like the ability to paint either with or without lighting in the scene. It helps to see the form of the model better, it's more like real model painting.

What needs improving in BodyPaint 3D?
Having used Photoshop for so long, it would be nice to have some more Photoshop-style features like an ability to distort a selected area, or a Color mode for the paintbrush.

What do you like to do in your spare time?
I used to do all the obvious things any self-respecting nerd does: play computer games, watch a lot of sci-fi, ... But I hit long overdue adulthood at the age of thirty-five, when I had my daughter. She's now five and uses up pretty well all of my spare time. Now I play on the swings, make fairy princess jewellery out of the inside of toilet rolls and dance along with the Sugar Babes CD.

We understand you were a big fan of dinosaurs long before you painted their skins. What do you find most fascinating about dinosaurs?
They were so alien from anything alive today, almost like mythological monsters, but they were here right where we are standing now. It's fascinating that palaeontology is being rewritten constantly as new discoveries are being made. The revelation that not all dinosaurs became extinct - that birds are living dinosaurs - is great.

If you think about it, all the clues were there: Dinosaurs laid eggs; some had beaks; some had feathers; they had a honeycomb of air pockets in their bones like birds, birds legs are often scaly and three-toed like dinosaur footprints show. I have an interest in all animals, but dinosaurs are the most spectacular. Five ton predators are hard to match.


One of Daren's favourite jobs is painting the colour maps. "I like the projection paint mode. It's really good for fixing seams in the UV maps by painting across them." Image courtesy of Impossible Pictures/ITV/Framestore CFC.

If you could travel back in time and rescue one dinosaur from extinction, which one would it be and why?
An Allosaurus. As I say, huge predators are spectacular. T-rex came in at a guesstimate of five tons or so. That would probably make it a tad slow on its feet. Allosaurus was a bit smaller, so may have been a bit more nimble. It must have been a sight to see it run down its prey. I like its head ornamentation. Those horns must have given it an evil frown.

What do you think about the current state of the CG industry in the UK?
It's getting very competitive. The UK is landing a lot of high-end work on big movies. We are up there with the best of them. It used to be that the main pool of talent was the other side of the Atlantic, but things are changing. Talent is global. There are pockets around the globe, Soho in London being one of them.

What kinds of projects would you like to work on in the future?
I know that remakes are a bit of a plague at the moment, but to do a Harryhausen-esque is my ideal project. Mythological monsters. I'd also like to do a project that involves creating matte painted landscapes along the lines of the images that the Hudson River painters used to do. Painters like Albert Bierstadt and Frederick Church. Romanticized scenes with forested vistas, smouldering volcanoes, classical ruins, huge stormy skies.

Web:
www.framestore-cfc.com

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