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Ankylosaur Attack Art Demo from the Vancouver International Writers Festival

by Daniel Loxton, Oct 25 2011
Photo of Loxton and Ruurs on stage

Daniel Loxton and Margriet Ruurs on stage at the 2011 Vancouver International Writers Festival during pre-show sound check.

I’ve just returned from the 2011 Vancouver International Writers Festival, where I shared the stage with veteran children’s author Margriet Ruurs at a sold out event at Granville Island’s Waterfront Theatre.

Our event was a behind the scenes tour of Margriet’s recent books (including Amazing Animals, beautifully illustrated by W. Allan Hancock) and my own new Ankylosaur Attack (illustrated by yours truly with Jim W. W. Smith).

Margriet’s talk introduced the audience to the production arc that takes an illustrated children’s book from idea to store shelves. My talk discussed some of the technical tricks and challenges of photorealistic CG dinosaur art that I’ve previously shared on Skepticblog and with Scientific American. I also took the audience through a number of step-by-step demonstrations of the modeling, texturing and compositing processes used in creating Ankylosaur Attack—and I thought I might share a peek at the compositing process here today.

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4 Responses to “Ankylosaur Attack Art Demo from the Vancouver International Writers Festival”

  1. Max says:

    What’s hard about taking out the leaves? Filling in the background? Did you use the clone tool?

    • Ha, yes—I used every tool in the book. This scene wasn’t the worst of them, and all the scenes were for print at 16 by 11 inches (5100 by 3414 pixels). That meant the removals had to be seamless at very close examination—for large sections of matted leaves, and for hundreds of leaves too small to be visible in this tiny slideshow.