Rhythm & Hues raised the bar with Grumpy, the T-Rex, with new skin detail and muscle flexing. All Images: Rhythm & Hues / Universal Pictures © 2009 Universal Studios.

There is plenty of new skin and muscle on display in Rhythm & Hues' dinosaur work for Land of the Lost, providing a welcome respite from their recent fur work.

Rhythm & Hues did all of the dinosaurs and set extensions encompassing 536 shots (Hammerhead handled the interior pile on sequences). The cast of characters include the T-Rex called Grumpy and the Alisorus named Alice, along with various Deinonychyuses, Compsognathuses and Teradactals.

"Grumpy represents our latest in terms of skin and muscle technologies," suggests Bill Westenhofer, R& H's visual effects supervisor. "He's got a tremendous amount of detail with the skin and muscle flexing, and I think it surpasses what's been done with dinosaurs to date. A lot of it was done procedurally, but there was a lot of it that was hand-animated from a muscle standpoint that actually involved our tech animators walking outside and videotaping themselves and feeling what muscles in their legs are moving. And they'll kill me for saying this, but they actually oiled up somebody's leg so they could see it more clearly. There's secret videotape that was used for reference, but to save embarrassment for the person involved, that will remain hidden."

Westenhofer contends that this project was more evolutionary than revolutionary for them. "We built upon a lot of the technologies that we had. A lot of the stuff we did on Hulk, in fact, carried over, letting skin slide over muscles that are in the process of deforming and picking up those shapes on the surface. There was a little extra R&D work done to make sure that scales that are meant to be rigid wouldn't deform. As designed, Grumpy, for the most part, is a realistic T-Rex, but we added these ridged barbs on the back of its neck that could rise like cackles…

"From an R&D standpoint, there's a lot more work done on the waterfall sequence that we did with the dinosaurs. In the original series, there's a whole opening that's essentially Sid & Marty Krofft's garden hose making a little stream in the backyard with a two-inch raft. That was their visual effect, so what we've done is spruce it up for modern audiences and used our water simulation software called Ahab. So we did a lot of tests and there was a set that was built: essentially a plume ride with water pumped through it. But then we took over and the whole thing starts to disintegrate and there's this worm hole that opens up and sucks them off to the land of the last -- and that was all done digitally. They were shot on a motion-controlled gimbal that supported the raft and moved it around and we added the environments to match."