3D
Paleoart

So, our big idea… is not just about recreating dinosaurs. We will build a huge, living, digital library of all of deep time, one that scientists can actually look at and check our work. These 3D models we're making, they're meant to be scientific instruments first, and then assets for movies or games. Each animal is built in layers, from bones, muscle, fat, skin... all on separate tracks. You can even adjust these "uncertainty bands" for the stuff we aren't 100% sure about. There will even be a slider to age them, from a little hatchling all the way to an old adult. You can switch between male and female, or just make them look like different individuals. We're considering modeling the microscopic structure of feathers and scales so they look and reflect light exactly right. Everything is built to a real-world scale and standardized, so you can just drop them into any game engine and they'll work.

And the skeletons, the 'rigs', behave like actual bodies. The joints don't just bend any way you want; they're limited by the real shape of the fossil bones, respecting how thick the cartilage would've been. The muscles are actual 3D systems that pull on a realistic skin rig, so when a muscle tenses, you actually see it bulge. We're building libraries of poses, some are 'clinical' ones for anatomy books, and others are 'field' poses we've figured out from looking at real fossil trackways. We test every single animation against physics, too. For instance, is it using way too much energy? Would it fall over? So the animation itself becomes a kind of scientific experiment.

We're building the entire worlds of the animals as well. The environments come with real climate data, prevailing winds, how the water flows... all based on scientific models. We're modeling how sediment moves and coastlines change over thousands of years. The plants actually grow based on rules, and you'll see different plants depending on what time period or latitude you're in. Even the shaders on the leaves are smart, they know about specific details such as stomatal density to look right and even 'sweat' like real leaves. The water in a muddy river looks completely different from a clear lake, because the physics of the water optics are correct. You can even fly a camera down through the ground and see the rock layers change over time, all of it stratigraphically accurate.

Every animal gets a whole list of behaviors: how it walks, hunts, nests, sleeps, avoids parasites, even how it might limp if it was injured. It's all based on physics and energy costs. We're even building in social behaviors like herd hierarchies or nesting behaviors, and making audio models for their calls based on the actual physics of how their syrinx, or voice boxes, might have worked. We're modeling their whole lives, from how many eggs they laid to how fast they grew.

Here's the best part, though. We're giving it all away. As part of the global museum, it's all open-source, we're calling it the 'Kingdom of Life.' Thousands of these rigged animals, totally free for students, researchers, filmmakers, anyone. And we're showing our work. Every single model comes with a full list of citations, the fossil specimen numbers, and a log of why we made every single choice. There'll be a small council of scientists, artists, and teachers to manage the 'master' files, to keep them stable for classrooms, but anyone can 'fork' the project and test out their own wild, speculative ideas.

The tool we're building to make all this is like a mix of Blender and an AI assistant. You can use natural language, say what you want, and it builds node graphs. You can mark up a skeleton and it'll rig it for you. There will be an 'explain this pose' button you can hit, and it'll overlay all the muscles that are firing, show you the center of balance, torque plots, all of it. The AI can help retarget animations, fix stuff, label joints, even set up lighting based on the actual time of day in the Cretaceous. And there's this little display that shows you the provenance... where every single vertex, every texture, every behavior came from.

Since the models are built on parameters, the AI can treat their bodies like a 'genome' of forms. It can guess what an ancestor might have looked like, somewhere between two different species. Or it can generate plausible developmental glitches. You can give it clues from modern birds and crocs, and it'll suggest what the soft-tissue might've looked like... and even give you a confidence score on its own guess. It lets you see how different competing theories would actually look and move. This would be an excellent experimental tool to test theories of evolutionary biology or molecular paleontology, for instance. This is the closest we can get to seeing dinosaurs, for now. Later, we'll get to biohybrid dinosaur animatronics.

Apart from a theme park, it's a library. It's this 'genome' of life that plugs into everything... biology, physics, earth science, you name it. A student could use it to simulate bone stress. A studio could drop a perfect, canonical Velociraptor into their film. A museum could run a real-time exhibit. And a researcher can go test some wild new hypothesis without breaking the 'master set' that classrooms are using.

We're going to strategically reconstruct only a subset of the models, focusing on 3D animations for Enchiridion on YouTube. Based on the feedback we receive from these, we will reconstruct the remaining species. Audience feedback will drive our product development cycle. Every new, vetted animal strengthens the whole library. Every classroom and movie that uses it strengthens the demand. The moonshot, the big dream, is to rebuild all of prehistory as this open, free instrument that anyone can play, but at a Pixar-level of quality. All by yourself, if you want.

We aim to create photorealistic 3D models and environments that make anyone go, "Wow! This is something special!" Our videos are actively moving the channel in this direction. We believe in 3D's potential to help people visualize abstract scientific topics and see them animated, in movement, visibly. This eases understanding and allows us to connect it to our real-world experiences.

3D Paleoart helps pave the way toward a Digital Earth by transforming paleontological data into immersive, interactive digital environments that effectively combine science, art, and technology. This allows researchers and the public to visualize extinct species in realistic ecosystems, integrating anatomical, ecological, and environmental data into one holistic framework. It enhances education, conservation, and innovation by making complex data accessible and interconnected.