After the amazing success of Walking with Dinosaurs, the BBC decided to bring the magic back to the small screen with the sequel Walking with Beasts. Technological breakthroughs in animation have made it possible to visually create worlds never seen before, giving this series the potential to be even more realistic than its predecessor.

Scheduled for a November screening, Beasts' creators at the BBC turned again to London-based Framestore for the animation magic that made the first series so famous. The project ended up being one of the largest animation and visual effects projects undertaken by the company, and Mike Milne, director of animation, had to double the size of his team to help create the many creatures. The team then had to meet the challenge of a range of movements and textures way beyond those created for ‘Dinosaurs.

Research for the show has been in depth, and filming took place last year across several continents and even below the sea. Work with animatronics also took place at this time, with creatures created at the Crawley Creatures workshop outside Oxford. Moving heads, limbs, and even underwater models were created and used for the show. After this basic filming was completed, the work was then passed over to Framestore for 18 solid months work.

All the animation and rendering of the creatures took place using a similar pipeline to that used for the original Walking with Dinosaurs, with a total of 271 separate programs being employed to make the process run smoothly. Moreover, Beasts was such a big task to undertake that it would not have been practicable for the team to start over from scratch, especially as they had a tried and tested pipeline already set up. Extra effort had to be put in when it came to creating the basic skeletons and looks of the many creatures from ‘Beasts - numerous animals having never been reconstructed before. Many of the creatures seen have evolved into pigs, cats, shrews, elephants - all the mammals we see today. The series even contains humanoid, upright walking creatures. “This was more adventurous for us,” said Max Tyrie, animation supervisor at Framestore. “There were more complex shots, more creatures, more hurdles to overcome. It was all very enjoyable.”

All the work came together to create three solid hours of animation. However, they didn’t just leave it at creating the creatures. The team took it upon themselves to work on new angles and types of filming to take the animation even further. “We worked with different camera styles from hand-held tracking to wide angle, fish eye lenses,” said Tyrie. They also worked on film speeds such as time ramping, ultra slow motion and even timeslicing (aka the Bullet Time effect from The Matrix). Time lapse scenes include watching a herd of mammoths graze over land whilst the clouds fly by overhead. “We took our inspiration from ‘Dinosaurs,” said Tyrie, “and then took into consideration what trends have appeared since then. With this work we are attempting to break the mould.”

A lot of time and effort went into creating the wide selection of creatures but the basic approach remained the same throughout. First, a 2D computer animated model of the creature was created, from a selection of angles; top, left side, right side, bottom etc., which were then put together to create a 3D version. Three layers of texture mapping then took place; from colour, to bump mapping and then shine. This created realistic looking animals with lifelike skin. After being placed into shot shadow was added to create the final lifelike model of a beast that existed millions of years ago.

Of all the hurdles Framestore had to face, creating realistic fur would have had to be the hardest. “Its quite tricky,” said Martin Macrae, digital texture artist. “There’s no easy way to do it.” Firstly the team tried out a selection of software programs, even considering creating their own custom programmes to deal with the problem. Finally, they chose a combination of off-the-shelf packages consisting of Softimage3D, Maya, Mental Ray for the rendering, and Photoshop for painting the texture, to create the pipeline which created the fur. Strands or tufts of hair were hand sculpted with one hair in a hundred being individually created - the programme was then told how long the hair wanted to be, how dense etc. The programme then did the mathematical calculations to create that area of the skin with the designated hair. The team found that this approach worked best for long hair, and that sometimes short hair could be painted on. The animators went even further with some of the mammoth scenes; they had to create snow falling onto the hair which was then made to matt.

Overall, the hard work seems to have paid off and anticipation is running high. Through Framestore's latest work we are now able to glimpse into a world not seen before, and witness the dawn of the mammals.