From Jurassic Park to 3D Fashion | Russell Koonce | PI Apparel

About 30 years ago, Hollywood went through a radical shift in how visual effects and animation were created that changed filmmaking forever. Hi, welcome. My name is Russell Kuntz. I was in the middle of that change working at Lucasfilm's Industrial Light and Magic, ILM, starting in 1994 on the movie Casper. I was a visual effects artist at ILM for over 10 years. Doing lighting and rendering primarily. And I got the chance to work on some wonderful films, including Star Wars, which I didn't put any Star Wars clips in there. Later, I spent another 10 years at Nike in digital product creation as part of the 3D apparel team. So I'd like to share some things that we learned in the film industry going through this transition from— analog to digital, 2D to 3D, that can apply to fashion as it embraces 3D workflows. So how did visual effects go from this old school to this? The 3D dinosaurs of Jurassic Park stunned audiences in 1993, and it seemed to be an overnight breakthrough. But the tech had actually been slowly developing for 20 years. The Lucasfilm Computer Group, which later spun off to become Pixar, together with ILM, had some early breakthroughs with 3D in the 1980s. The Genesis effect in Star Trek II, Death Star graphics in Return of the Jedi, the stained glass knight from Young Sherlock Holmes, the first character— CG character in a film, The water creature from The Abyss, and the liquid metal Terminator 2. Despite all those advances, the consensus in the early 1990s was that computer animation 3D was not up to the task of doing realistic living animals. So Jurassic Park was almost a very different film, made in the traditional way using stop-motion guided by Phil Tippett, who animated the Imperial Walkers in The Empire Strikes Back, and Stan Winston, whose studio created iconic movie characters like the Terminator, the Predator, and the Alien Queen. His studio would be creating physical animatronic dinosaurs to interact with the actors on the set, and Phil Tippett's team would do the rest with stop-motion. Stop-motion uses poseable models. So one frame is photographed, then the model is moved slightly, photographed again, and so when you play that back at speed, they appear to move. It's the same kind of thing you see in like Wallace and Gromit, King Kong. So these are some early tests of this approach. The plan was to do it this way, and ILM's only job for computer graphics would be to add a little bit of blur to this to make them less jerky. But one rebellious animator at ILM forced a major change. Steve Williams, also known as Spaz, worked in secret to model and animate this T-Rex skeleton walking. It was a bold move, but he had been senior animator on both The Abyss and Terminator 2, so he was one of very few people at that time in the industry who knew what was possible. Even though the decision had already been made to use stop motion, he was specifically told not to show this animation. He arranged to have it playing on a monitor when the producers came for a visit. They were amazed, and then they in turn showed it to Steven Spielberg, who was also amazed, and he decided to take a gamble that 3D could replace stop-motion. So here's the producer of Jurassic Park, Kathleen Kennedy, talking about the impact of these early 3D tests.

It was one of those incredible moments. You know, every now and then when you're involved in an industry, something happens and you know that it's just just incredibly groundbreaking, and it's gonna change everything. And this was one of those moments. Every single one of us jumped to our feet because we couldn't believe what we were looking at. It's sort of like splitting the atom. You know, once it happens, the industry shifts and everybody starts talking.

Everybody wanted to see the movie. Everyone was excited about the movie. Everyone wanted to know how we made the movie. It was just unbelievable.

It was one of those movies that became a phenomenon.

Change pop culture.

Phil Tippett, in a moment, realized what he was doing was obsolete. Stan Winston saw at that moment that technology was going to begin to encroach on what it was he did. It was clear to everybody that the movie industry was changing.

So far from being obsolete, Phil Bill Tippett's lifelong interest in dinosaurs and knowledge of how they should move was still very important to the production. So he basically became the animation supervisor. He created these animatics to guide the 3D animators, but also so that Spielberg would have them on, on the set while filming to explain the action to the crew and the actors. While a storyboard is just a static sketch, the animatics helped everyone understand where the 3D dinosaurs would be, the timing of their movement in each shot, and how the individual shots related to the overall scene. And to bridge the technology gap for the stop-motion animators, who were accustomed to working with their hands directly on a model, they created this dinosaur input device, which allowed them to manipulate the 3D model remotely, similar to the way of working that they were comfortable with. And the physical or practical dinosaurs also played a larger role than some audiences may have realized, given all the hype around computer graphics.

After that, there became a real trend towards overreliance on CG, and I think a lot of the great work that we did got overshadowed. I think it's about 15 minutes of dinosaurs in that whole movie. And 9 of it was done with, with our practical dinosaurs in one shape or form or another. It's not to take anything away from what great CGI work was done and how groundbreaking and how game-changing that was.

So one reason why the effects of the original Jurassic Park still look good 30 years later is this mix of skills and techniques that were combined. The old and new tech worked together to have a greater impact than either would have by itself. It was really the best of both worlds. In addition to the dinosaurs, advancements in digital image compositing in Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park opened the door for effects that were more subtle than a rampaging T-Rex. Compositing is combining all the different layers into a final image, much like layers in Photoshop. It's the last step before a shot goes into the movie And it's the 2D blending that makes the 3D believable. Forrest Gump, which ILM worked on right after Jurassic Park, is a great example of how this could be used to enhance the storytelling.

Back in the old days, you know, in the '90s, which we can call the old days, ILM was actually starting their computer graphics department. And Forrest Gump was made right when the industry, the visual effects industry, was making the big transition from photochemical to digital.

I don't know if anyone really had looked that far ahead as what digital would, the kind of doors it would open up. It took a while for it to sink in for anybody. Getting into films like Forrest opened up, for me anyway, a way to use digital technology in a very subtle way, not big and explosive, although there's some of that in the movie, but it's how to use it in subtle blends and how to change a sky when nothing else is touched. Like the birds flying out of the cornfield. Walking down the avenue of the trees and the shadows are moving at an accelerated rate. It's a strange sort of dreamlike moment.

In some ways it could be argued that the old analog technique was a little bit more of a craft because it, you know, involved a lot of instincts. I would say that, you know, equally now in the digital realm, it's just as hard because we now have new challenges. You know, with new tools and new abilities always comes greater expectation, and those greater expectations are actually being met now with greater tools. And so it's kind of this ongoing, you know, sort of mountain that you can never climb because, you know, the goals and achievements and expectations just keep rising with the tools.

So, as big an impact as Jurassic Park had, Forrest Gump had an equally big or maybe even a bigger impact because suddenly they realized, like, we can do different things, we can tell different stories that we never thought we could tell before. And now these kind of effects are everywhere and we don't even see them anymore, they're so seamlessly blended. So, what are some practical lessons to accelerate adoption of 3D? First of all, you can train a designer to use a computer, but you can't train a programmer to design. And that sounds harsh. It's very judgmental. And of course there are exceptions, but it's also generally true. We've learned this, especially with animators. You can teach an animator to use a computer no matter how fond they are of drawing, but the reverse is rarely true. So, as ILM shifted from physical effects shot on a stage to computer graphics, some of the craftspeople from the stage and the model shop made the switch, some reluctantly. It was a challenge for them, but in time they became some of the best 3D artists in the industry because they already had an artistic eye, and they had years of experience, and knew what worked and what didn't. So, here's director James Cameron speaking about this during the production of his film Terminator 2.

I found a whole bunch of really, really smart stupid people who understood code and understood higher math and understood software at a level that I couldn't begin to comprehend. But when it came to simple things like perspective, they didn't get it. And they couldn't understand why the shots weren't working. They should have worked. The math said the shot would work, but the shot didn't look real. Why not? Well, how about perspective? How about aerial perspective? How about this? How about that? How about shadows? How about it now? All these subtle things that anybody who had a background in optical printing would have understand.

So I had been on my own journey from analog to digital. I didn't set out to become a 3D artist. In fact, that really wasn't a thing back then. You couldn't go to school to learn how to do this. I was studying industrial design at Art Center College of Design in Southern California in Switzerland in the late 1980s. And Art Center was a traditional design school. You know, we learned to sketch and render by hand. We learned perspective. We built models in the shop with wood and foam and plastic, and we sculpted clay models. But there was also a new computer lab with 3 huge Silicon Graphics workstations running a 3D software from Canada called Alias. The computers were loud, they were hot, the software was slow, the terminology was strange, things like B-splines and control vertices and ray tracing, things we didn't know anything about. Our files were stored on a magnetic tape the size of a paperback book that we had to carry around with us, and there was no undo function in the software. So, it was a challenge to complete even one or two models during a semester of school. We would wait for hours for a render to finish, only to notice some problem and have to start all over. But I enjoyed it despite the difficulties. It seemed like this was the future, so I stuck with it. And after graduation, I went to work for Alias, demonstrating the software at trade shows and consulting with customers. And initially I worked with industrial design clients, but I knew this was the same software that was used on The Abyss and Terminator 2. And I had always loved movie special effects, so I learned everything I could about it. And eventually that led me to ILM. So that's another piece of advice. Never stop learning. You don't know where it's going to take you. There's so much information online now— tutorials, sample projects, free courses, paid courses, mentorship. I mean, it's just endless. And none of that existed in the '80s or the '90s. And conferences like PI, of course, are a great place. But you all already know that. Great place to stay aware of the latest trends. And if your company sponsors training, that's wonderful. But don't wait for it. There's nothing preventing you from learning on your own. Some of the best 3D artists are completely self-taught. And always stay flexible. There will always be preferred workflows, best practices, and these almost always change over time. One of the main skills we learned at ILM was how to quickly get familiar with new software. A lot of our software was custom written in-house with no documentation. So it was just kind of like, here, figure it out. But we didn't have to know everything. We just had to know enough to do whatever job was at hand. So, it's important to be open-minded and flexible, because there will definitely be a change in the tools at some point. But just as traditional skills will transfer to 3D, your skills in one software will easily transfer to another. You just need to learn where the new buttons are and the names of the buttons. So, focus on the skills, not one specific software. This is a snapshot of different software and file formats that I've had to use during the course of my career. Quite a few of these don't even exist anymore. So it's good to have a mindset of just constantly learning. So what are some strategies to help scale 3D? One is to build on each success. As we've seen, ILM steadily improved their 3D skills over about 10 years, from young Sherlock Holmes to The Abyss, Terminator 2, and and finally, Jurassic Park. One common practice was to conduct what they call a postmortem after each project. This is to document what worked, what didn't, any innovations that other projects could benefit from, and so on. ILM's developed a very robust process for this, and it keeps driving innovation forward. Disney was going on a similar journey at the same time, going from simple geometric shapes of Tron to the computer graphic clockworks in The Great Mouse Detective, which were printed out on paper and still painted by hand, to the fully rendered ray traced ballroom in Beauty and the Beast, to the magic carpet in Aladdin. It had such an intricate pattern that the animators couldn't draw that, so they did that using computer graphics, but they kept the tassels hand-drawn, so it was a nice hybrid. And finally, Lion King with the wildebeest stampede. One of the animators who worked on this actually came and worked with us on Casper. And she had done several different wildebeest animations. And then they wrote code to multiply those out and follow this terrain. So they were building their capabilities with every new project. For 3D to be successful, the whole organization needs to be involved. It requires many additional roles, a lot of support roles. Training is great. If, if the company has budget for internal training, that's wonderful. When I started working on Casper, I'd been doing 3D more or less on my own for about 6 years, but I had a lot to learn about working on a team this big and on such a complex project that was really cutting edge. Likewise, In fashion, one designer or developer working in 3D may only have a limited impact by themselves, and the 3D work may be a dead end, or it may just be duplicating decisions that are really made in 2D. So it, it needs more support across the organization. Just like with AI now, there was a fear that 3D would eliminate jobs, but what happened in the visual effects industry is the roles have expanded greatly as digital work has allowed for more effects, more complex effects and more believable effects to the point where a lot of big movies now, superhero movies, the whole movie basically has effects in it, thousands and thousands of shots. And it's an assembly line approach. Many of the artistic and technical roles are very specialized, like someone will just do hair or someone just does cloth. But they're also highly collaborative and the teams share knowledge. It takes a combination of people with artistic sensibilities and technical skills working together. So studios like ILM, Disney, and Pixar pair brilliant computer scientists with highly talented artists to create amazing visuals. And automation is one area where that partnership pays off. Designers and artists often shy away from it because coding or scripting is seen as a foreign skill set, which it kind of is. It's that whole right brain, left brain thing again. But it's also incredibly powerful and can boost efficiency, even if it's just a simple action of a few commands. So as artists or designers, we can try to find a technical partner who will work with us to optimize our workflow and reduce manual steps. So in the film studios, automation connects the various roles into what they call a pipeline. But really, a pipeline is basically nothing more than software inputs and outputs handed off from person to person or role to role, task to task. And it's very different than working on your own. You can't just save files on your desktop and name them whatever you like. You have to follow standards or things just don't work. You may have to prepare your file a certain way or export it in a particular way. Our pipeline at ILM in the 1990s was mostly driven by simple text files and just a list of commands and references to other things. So it would say, you know, use this model with these materials, render it with this camera and these lights, and it would kind of bring all those together. But it was just a simple text, text file. It was easy to make a typo and you would be driving home and you would get a call on your phone or you'd get home and have a call waiting because we had 24/7 support. The render times were so long that the work had to take all night. And so we did a lot of remote debugging just over the phone. So earlier I mentioned staying flexible. Right now, visual effects is going through another dramatic revolution, virtual production. So this is the use of game engines like Unreal combined with LED walls and a small set that blends in with those walls to simulate a much larger environment. Production of The Mandalorian has been leading the charge, finding creative ways to use this technology. It allows for much more collaboration than the traditional way of filming. It's historically been a very linear process. So after the initial idea and the script, you have pre-production, all the concept design and the planning. Location scouting, and then you have the actual production, live-action shoot. Then comes post where the visual effects gets added. And so by that time, the cast and crew has moved on to their next project. So there's almost no chance for collaboration at that point. And that's where the saying, "Fix it in post" comes from. The visual effects team is stuck with the footage they've been given and they just have to try to make it work. But now with virtual production, much of that work happens before the shoot. So it's kind of flipped everything on its head. Instead of green screen sets, the environments that used to be added later are now built in advance, displayed on the walls, and visible to the cast and crew while filming. And there are benefits for everyone, especially the actors.

[SPEAKING CHINESE] There's nothing like it. You go on set, and it's there. It takes your breath away. There's no way that you cannot react just naturally as an actor when you're in that environment. You already have something the Guild values far more than me. You just don't see it.

I'm losing my mind. I'm trying to keep it cool. I'm trying to, like, you know, do the acting thing. This is nuts.

We didn't have to imagine any of it. We didn't have to follow the X. There was none of that. There was no faking it. You were literally there.

A traitor!

It's just an amazing piece of technology, and for us as actors, it just makes our job so much better. It transports you somewhere. It makes you feel like you're there.

So fashion can take advantage of all these years of innovation in visual effects. I worked for a couple of years with the team building the, the app called Stage, which uses Unreal to offer real-time apparel visualization. Learning to use Unreal by itself is a daunting task. Tools such as this allow designers to harness the power of Unreal without needing to devote a great deal of time and effort to becoming experts at it. So, what are some common pitfalls to avoid when scaling digital product creation? One is keep in mind it's just another tool in your toolbox. People often assume that the computer does all the work for you. We had a running joke at ILM that all our computers had a button that said "make dinosaur" because there were so many interviews and behind-the-scenes videos that gave the impression that the computer did all the work instead of someone laboriously slaving over this model and painting it and adding all the details and setting it up to be animated. Behind-the-scenes videos tend to focus on more exciting things like actors jumping around and doing stunts on a green screen because it's just not that exciting to look at someone with a mouse pointing at a monitor. But for these reasons, some people feel that digital work is somehow cheating, or it's not authentic, it's not real work. So in an industry with a long tradition of craft, and the film industry was definitely that, fashion is also, it can be a real challenge to explain digital workflows compared to traditional ways of working that everyone is familiar with. But digital workflows are just an extension of the same craft. It can also be difficult at first to trust the results of working in 3D. But once teams begin to see all the additional benefits from working digitally, that trust will come. I was part of the training department at Lucasfilm Singapore. And we had a class we called boot camp to help everyone better understand the pipeline. So the idea behind boot camp was everyone would go through a few days or half days of training to create a simple 3D scene. So you'd make a box or a sphere and animate it a little bit, put a texture on it, put some lights on it, render it. And we had everybody go through this. So not just technical artists who needed to come in and learn the pipeline because they're going to be using it every day, but, you know, HR and executive assistants and leadership. Everybody went through this even though they're never going to touch it again, but just to give them a better sense. And finally, one big issue is leadership that doesn't understand 3D. Leaders don't need to be experts, but they should at minimum have a basic high-level overview. And if there are already people within the company working on developing 3D workflows, leadership should listen to them, trust them, and learn from them. Too often companies pay consultants to come in and basically interview the people doing 3D, document what's already being done, and then simply report that back to management and collect a big paycheck. So to sum up, it may take a rebellion by one designer or one team to be the champion of 3D within a company. As was the case with visual effects, a mix of old and new tech may have the most impact, but it needs to be supported in order to scale. And it requires close collaboration between apparel designers, tech developers, color and material designers, tech support, process teams, and of course leadership. It wasn't that long ago that 3D tools for fashion were either not available or were not designer-friendly or struggled to handle the complexity of fabrics, garment construction, and the physics of drape and collision. But that's no longer the case. I believe fashion is ready to fully embrace 3D. And there are plenty of visual effects artists out there who can help, many of whom have experience with complex materials, digital twins, cloth simulation, and avatars, a lot of the same things that you're dealing with. So my one takeaway that I hope you get from this is the visual effects studios that successfully, gracefully made the transition from analog to digital encouraged collaboration between all the teams. They openly shared what worked and what didn't and learned from each project for continual improvement. Thank you.