AACAD gives a young T. Rex new life

AACAD gives a young T. Rex new life
Alicia Ritchey
Issue date: 8/17/06 Section: Arts

She's 66 million years old, 21-feet long with a voracious appetite for flesh, and thanks to the Ohio State Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design, she's been brought back to life.

Meet Jane: She's the world's most complete juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex, and she's being featured in "Jane: Diary of a Dinosaur" at the Burpee Museum of Natural History in Rockford, Ill.

"After undergoing four years of digging, dusting and study, Jane is now on display as the centerpiece of permanent exhibit at Burpee Museum," said Molly Holman, manager of exhibits. "You will discover what Jane's world was like, what happened during those millions of years she lay buried, visit the expedition's Montana base camp, see what scientists learned from Jane's bones and view Jane's fully restored 21-foot skeleton."

Jane was discovered by the museum in 2001 and named after the wife of one of the museum's major benefactors. In an effort to create an interactive exhibit centered on her, museum officials got in touch with ACCAD.

"ACCAD was already working on producing some CG (computer graphics) animations for an independently produced documentary film about Jane," said Barbara Ceiga, project manager for the exhibit. "We saw their work and began holding discussions about how they might become involved with the exhibit."

According to a press release, students from ACCAD did everything from research to touch-screen design, 3-D computer animation, model building, surfacing, lighting, texturing and sound design.

"We had to be very organized," Ceiga said. "We held weekly video conferences with the ACCAD group and kept in touch through e-mails and telephone calls."

To keep Jane true to life, Director of ACCAD Maria Palazzi said the students worked very closely with the scientists at the Burpee Museum to come to understand what they knew scientifically about Jane, so that they could best represent her.

"We even work with Columbus College of Art and Design (CCAD) and got their students involved with us on the project during the storyboarding phase," she said. "Creating that much computer animation was a big group effort that could not have been done without the creativity of these very bright students."

Tyler Ayres, third year graduate student at OSU who worked on the project, said authenticity was a challenge that arose from time to time.

"Often, when creating dinosaur movies and TV shows, real background footage is filmed of the environment and then animators and compositors make the dinosaurs look like they are part of that environment," he said. "With the museum's animation, we had to create the backgrounds in the computer also."

Palazzi said there were two parts to the Jane project. In June 2005, ACCAD contributed the touch-screen interactive exhibits and computer animation visualizing Jane and her life. Then in July 2006, ACCAD completed a 10 minute animation project for Discovery's Science Channel and Brave New Pictures, a one hour documentary on the discovery of Jane by the Burpee staff.

"The exhibit is wonderful and Jane is just a beautiful specimen. The Burpee did an incredible job on this exhibit," Palazzi said. "It appeals to all ages and to see the size of Jane in real life is really astounding. When we are working on the computer it is always hard to get a feeling for life-size so we loved seeing her in full-size at the exhibit."