Walking with dragons

Walking with dragons
MillTV is behind the special effects and CG models of dragons and reptiles in a new BBC1 documentary series, Dragons Alive. The BBC's Natural History programmes have a great track record, partly due to the high quality of the 3D and effects involved in the recreation of majestic creatures. Before the CG work began, under the guidance of Visual Superviser Dave Throssell, an immense amount of research was conducted to track skeleton movements via X-ray camera. The results were developed further with series producers to achieve a more interesting visual style - adding vivid colours to the X-ray shots and using white backgrounds to differentiate the sequences from conventional X-ray imagery. SoftImage|XSI was then used to recreate this footage in 3D. Finished sequences include a snake-biting