Has television CGI caught up with Jurassic Park?

I mean the first Jurassic Park in terms of CG power.

I know good CGI is getting cheaper every year and while CGI in movies have also gotten better and cheaper, can CGI the quality of the first JP been achieved on TV relatively cheap now?

I saw dinosaur revolution the other day and it got me thinking. This looks better than the first Jurassic Park, but is it really? does the tech match it? A lot of people are still making ridiculous claims that Jurassic Park's CGI hasn't been surpassed to this day. I think Dinosaur Revolution blows it away (maybe not in animation).

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Is this better than Jurassic Park?
 
There are people that said that Jurassic Park CGI hasn't been surpassed to this day?

Those people are wrong. Computing power should be a few order of magnitudes better than it was in 1993, not really hard to imagine getting better than that.
 
There are people that said that Jurassic Park CGI hasn't been surpassed to this day?

Those people are wrong. Computing power should be a few order of magnitudes better than it was in 1993, not really hard to imagine getting better than that.

Yes, there are people who say such things and it's pretty common too. That said, has it gotten to the point where television can surpass JP? That's what I'm curious about right now. Looking at Dinosaur Revolution, I think it does. Just the amount of detail you see on the skin of the Tyrannosaurus blows away JP.

I've also seen people claim television CGI still can't match Walking With Dinosaurs (which I thought was bad even back in 1999).
 
Oh sorry. Here's a trailer. You can watch it in HD.
I hate to say this (maybe it's just my faded memory), but the animations of that trailer are so worse than the first Jurassic Park that it makes the quality of the rest of the CGI irrelevant.
 
Yeah, generally the biggest difference between television CGI and older movie effects is the care and attention to detail in the animation. That's why Jurassic Park still holds up. TV shows don't have the time or budget for that level of keyframe or captured animation.
 
I think there's probably several reasons why Jurassic Park still gets a lot of love. One big difference between it and a lot of modern CGI efforts, is that they never overreached with it. They clearly picked their battles, using animatronics where ever possible. Another one that I've noticed is in how the CGI is actually shot. You never see shots where the camera suddenly becomes unpinned, where angles, speeds and direction changes are shown that would be impossible otherwise - the CG dinosaurs are shot in exactly the same manner as their animatronic counterparts.

Also scenes like the initial T-Rex encounter happen to be at night and in the pouring rain which probably helps sell the shots by adding noise to the picture.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5Co3A3fLBo
 
I think another big factor is the integration of the animation into the real life background video. You can have really nice creature cgi ruined by poorly done integration. That's another thing JP did really well.
 
Yeah, generally the biggest difference between television CGI and older movie effects is the care and attention to detail in the animation.

The other reason is that art direction and production design isn't as polished and advanced. TV productions can't hire Stan Winston's Legacy Effects or Phil Tippet on their budgets, they use smaller studios with less experienced people and far shorter schedules (less time to iterate and fix things).


But on a pure technical level we're way past JP1. Sometimes you can almost see the texture pixels on those creatures in close-ups, shaders are primitive, lighting is very simple with no GI or anything like that, and so on. It's the human factor that makes the difference.
 
It's safe to assume that no matter if you're doing a TV production or a movie, they'll still use bump mapping of some sort to help reduce the need for excessive polygon counts right?

I hate to say this (maybe it's just my faded memory), but the animations of that trailer are so worse than the first Jurassic Park that it makes the quality of the rest of the CGI irrelevant.

Yeah, there's no denying the animation isn't on par with the rest of their CG work. I saw the first 2 episodes and some of the animation is downright laughable. Though I heard former Disney and Pixar animators worked on this sucker.

Walking With Dinosaurs was television

Yes, I know. I was just comparing TV with TV. Sorry if I wasn't clear. Here is BBC's sequel to Walking With Dinosaurs. I've seen people claim that it's not on par with the CGI from the original.


There is no way in hell that trailer is worse than WWD.
 
It's safe to assume that no matter if you're doing a TV production or a movie, they'll still use bump mapping of some sort to help reduce the need for excessive polygon counts right?

More like displacement mapping. They tessellate the poly models and use a texture to move the vertices around.
 
The CGI in Dinosaur Revolution seems to have surpased JP1 but not JP2 and JP3...

Really? I thought 2 was quite a step backwards. The Stegosaurus entrance was nowhere near as good as the Brachiosaurus. The Stegosaurus just didn't blend in to the environments. The scene with the motorcycle driving under the Diplodocus looked horrible. The night scenes are about on par.

I agree with JP3 though. No matter how much people think the movie sucked, there's no way the CGI was inferior.
 
Really? I thought 2 was quite a step backwards. The Stegosaurus entrance was nowhere near as good as the Brachiosaurus.

The Brachiosaurus had very impressive loose skin animation. The T-Rex in JP1 is top notch, especially animation wise. None of the BBC stuff has anything like that. The resolution and detial on the BBC stuff is better, imho, but the animations are not nearly as good, not even close.

Important to note that not everything was CGI in Jurrassic Park mind you, and for the Walking with Dinosaurs show there are some interesting robotronics as well.

I agree with JP3 though. No matter how much people think the movie sucked, there's no way the CGI was inferior.

Yeah, I recently saw this one and it's pretty good.

In a month or two the 3 JP movies will be released on BluRay. I'm pretty tempted to pick them up, particularly with how big into my 3yo is into dinos. The only downside is that I can't show him all scenes because some of them are just pointlessly violent. He's not scared of anything really - the things that are scared to him are on a completely different level right now. He saw a youtube movie of a black robot that put a kid in bath, and that freaked him out to the point of running away screaming. :LOL: But the scene with the kids in the car, he just reenacts over and over again with his toy dino and a car, or when the dino isn't there, he gently nudges over the car with his own cheek ...

Kids are awesome. This is currently among his favorites. He sings along to it even though it's not his native language. It is clearly not of a JP level budget - the dino almost never actually interacts with anything, very few things are actually destroyed. But it's still nicely done.

 
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