Dr Matt Dempsey

I wonder if anyone is as annoyed that I didn't spell it "psych" as I know some people are annoyed about me making very mild unfunny jokes at the expense of a dinosaur that has been dead for 100 millionish years...

Sike! Carcharodontosaurs still suck.

From here on out I promise to better myself and never lightly rib or speak ill of *insert your favourite dinosaur* ever again.

Today I learned that as palaeontologists, we must be dispassionate, humourless, & impersonal at all times. Any kind of joking around about the apparently *super serious* topic of our favourite & least favourite dinosaurs, is, as I am told, a condemnable, severe professional bias.

Hey fellow scientists, I'm just letting you know that if you're promoting something with some junky AI image, I'm not gonna click. You've got a workshop, a conference, a new paper?

Just not gonna bother. You want a bespoke image? Hire an illustrator.

...where my design was visually differentiated from it (especially seeing as there is a lot of Jurassic Park influence elsewhere in the model). Ultimately, combined with the eye wrinkles (inspired by elephants), I want the eyes to give the impression of something very large but very old. (3/3)

...might be expected based on the size of the entire eye socket, so we can draw inferences from that. Secondly, from a design perspective, smaller eyes make a creature feel bigger. Thirdly, even though I love the Jurassic Park T. rex, it has really big eyes, and I wanted to make this an area...(2/3)

A handful of reasons, really. Firstly, even though this isn't meant to be a strict scientific reconstruction, real dinosaur anatomy is still very much baked into the process. We find that in large theropod dinosaur fossils, the sclerotic ring (the bony part of the eyeball) is smaller than... (1/3)

Under the hood things look rather cursed right now:

Even more dynamic wrinkles. Somebody needs to stop me tinkering so that this model can actually be properly animated in this lifetime...

The phrase "is this a bit much?" is starting to pop into my head...

And this is how the wrinkles show up at the highest mesh detail level:

The first result is looking pretty good I think. This is just the base topology. Weight painting on the deforming surface needs a bit of fixing, and the whole thing is maybe a little too jiggly, but it can be fine tuned .

Slightly saggier/heavier wrinkles. More in line with the overall vision for the character.

Dewlap wrinkle testing

Can't wait to share a proper animation with everything functioning!

It isn't the first muscle + soft body sim rig I've ever made, but it is functionally the most complex (and so far, has led to the most realistic results with the way in which the skin deformations look). I do love Blender.

Getting this muscle+skin deformation rig put together has been a real labour of love, and a fun learning process.

Does look pretty funny when you don't hide the simulated muscle belies, though.

Almost there. Just the pecs, neck, throat and jowls that need dedicated sims now.

We, the lifelong dinosaur enthusiasts, have already seen these concepts covered in the popular TV shows & books that we grew up with. But in the decades since, much of the general public may not have done, especially younger kids.

I really think we need to look past our own perception biases here!

Concepts such as the timing of the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous, the dinosaurs broadly around in each and the basic relationships between them, multiple mass extinctions within the Mesozoic, and the formation of Laurasia/Gondwana really aren't the general knowledge that you might see them as.

Revising this statement slightly after reading other takes: dinosaur folks *wildly* overestimate how much the general public already knows.

I think if your takeaway from the Netflix show is that audiences won't learn much, you're way deeper into fundamental dinosaur lore than 95% of people.

Further soft body deformation testing... (videos in replies)

Ultimately, I think that the value of hitting those fundamental beats outweighs the more niche critiques that I do have. The original WWD & WDRA are over two decades old now. We were overdue another major show that presents the linear story of the whole Mesozoic for new audiences

This is why I I'm going to place my stake in the ground on the claim that "The Dinosaurs" on Netflix is the strongest of the recent CGI palaeo shows. It does a pretty good job at presenting major contextual information and the fundamental beats to dinosaur evolutionary history.

Observation: I feel that many dinosaur folks have a habit of taking for granted what they already know versus what a general audience already knows, and that this can lead to something of a misalignment when it comes to judging the broader educational value of dinosaur media.

The Ankylosaurus in the Netflix show looks great, the best looking dinosaur in the series, I think. Solid anatomically, and the materials look very convincing.

The Plateosaurus & Massospondylus are also very strong. The subsurface scattering is a bit too high sometimes, though.