We had an in-house piece of software called Layerpaint at ILM, which I think was created by Doug Smythe. I just started doing some experiments, and I put together the first prototype implementation of Viewpaint. John Schlag: So I spent a couple of months doing a prototype implementation. Basically, the idea was, ‘Hey, we can render these pretty dense meshes and then be able to take whatever you’re painting and freeze it.’ Like, we can delete that leg temporarily, and just get rid of its visibility.’ So that was the kernel of the idea. I was thinking, ‘Wow, Jean has to go through all sorts crazy things because there’s like this leg in the way and it’s occluding where she wants to carry this texture, and we don’t have to. It was about being able to change some of the surfaces while you were doing the painting. What she did was a combination of sort of sculpting and painting at the same time for this one project, which we didn’t get to in the original Viewpaint, but we got in subsequent versions. Her name was Jean Bolte and she had been painting a tiger for a commercial. The other thing was, I’d had this experience with someone from ILM’s creature shop. You could stretch things in the texture map that you were projecting, but it was kind of painful. It worked particularly well if you had, like, a projection onto a surface that was from the angle you were projecting relatively planar, so you didn’t get too much in distortions. It was great for the shots we had in T2, but obviously it wasn’t that interactive in editing. The first thing was a tool we developed internally during Terminator 2 called Make Sticky, which basically projected images through a sort of pre-rendered buffer onto polygons and patched vertices as a way of texture mapping the surfaces. Tom Williams (supervisor of software and digital technology): There were two or three things I’d been thinking about before Viewpaint came to be. And Tom said, ‘Do you think we could do something like that in production?’ A page from the Pat Hanrahan and Paul Haeberli paper. It was the first real demonstration of a 3D paint system. It was by Pat Hanrahan and Paul Haeberli (‘ Direct WYSIWYG painting and texturing on 3D shapes,’ Computer Graphics, Volume 24, Number 4, August 1990). Anyway, I was working away on Death Becomes Her, and Tom Williams, who was then the manager of the new software department, he and I were chatting and he said, ‘You know, there was this cool paper at SIGGRAPH 1990. We had to do a very painstaking matchmove of the body, the neck and the head to get each of those shots to fly. I had written a 2D matchmove programme called MM2 that later evolved into Repo. We used Death Becomes Her to test a number of things that we were planning to do on Jurassic Park. John Schlag (computer graphics artist): After Terminator 2 and before Jurassic Park, we were working on Death Becomes Her. On the 25th anniversary of Jurassic Park, vfxblog goes back in time with several of the original creators and users of Viewpaint, a tool that would be used at ILM for many years, and for which its developers – John Schlag, Brian Knep, Zoran Kacic-Alesic and Tom Williams, received a Sci-Tech award in 1997. That’s how audiences got to see incredibly detailed dinosaur skin. Then, Viewpaint would map the painted pixels of that still image back into the appropriate pixels in the texture map, and render the model. It allowed artists to create an image that was a snapshot of a texture-mapped model that could be exported to an image-editing program to paint or modify the texture. But along the way, ILM made several other stunning tech breakthroughs for the 1993 film.Īmong them was the continued development of a 3D texturing tool called Viewpaint. It was a seminal moment in visual effects history. Most people will have heard about the Industrial Light & Magic animation test that convinced Steven Spielberg to adopt computer graphics for the full-motion dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. So then we thought, ‘Oh, shit.’ – John Schlag, computer graphics artist, Jurassic Park rex head is in your face and filling the frame, and eating a raptor or fighting. Viewpaint: ILM’s secret weapon on Jurassic Park
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