Behind The Scenes: Bringing Dinosaurs to Life

Creating living, breathing dinosaurs is no mean feat! A huge amount of careful work is completed by our dedicated development team as they work to build believable dinosaurs that look and behave like real animals within the sprawling simulation that is Jurassic World Evolution 3.

Today we’ll be pulling back the curtain to give you a look behind the scenes at exactly how we create dinosaurs for Jurassic World Evolution 3, from initial concept all the way through to their implementation in game. We’ll be joined by the unique looking Psittacosaurus as we walk through bringing this fascinating dinosaur from fossil to game engine.

Breathing Life into Extinct Animals

One of the first steps when creating the dinosaurs is for the team to take a dive under the earth into the world of palaeontology and paleoart.

As a team we benefit greatly from the wealth of research, dialogue and study that surrounds dinosaurs as one of the most enduringly popular subjects about our planet’s history. Palaeontological evidence is always evolving as new fossil discoveries are made, and new research reveals fascinating insights into the prehistoric world.

There is a limit to the paleontological evidence though. As the fossilisation process makes it rare for soft and delicate features to be preserved, we often don’t have exact knowledge of interesting details like skin texture, colouration or feathers. Many species also have limited fossils available at all, with sometimes only partial bone fragments discovered.

With the Psittacosaurus we were very lucky to benefit from the extremely well-preserved specimen housed at the Senkenberg museum in Frankfurt. Thanks to this fossil evidence and Laser-Simulated Fluorescence research, experts are able to get a picture of how the Psittacosaurs looked when it was alive, even including the colouring and patterning of its scales.

This research provides a fantastic starting point for our team to begin forming an image of what the Psittacosaurus may have looked like in real life, creating concept art which melds this scientific evidence, existing paleoart examples and the Jurassic World style into a unified design.

Critically, the team are always aware that we’re creating dinosaurs for a game first and foremost, which allows us to take some liberties in the design in favour of offering the best experience to our players. The Jurassic World universe also gives us some much-needed flexibility here as we refer to the depictions of dinosaurs across the franchise.

In the case of the Psittacosaurus this allowed the team to create something that is perhaps a little more colourful than we would have seen in real-life – including 84 different colour-combinations.

Families of Dinosaurs

Of course, in Jurassic World Evolution 3 we’re not simply creating a single female dinosaur for each species as we did in Jurassic World Evolution 2. The introduction of dimorphism and juveniles means that the team has created distinct and believable family units (with females, males and juveniles) for all species in the game (except hybrids), including returning species from previous games.

Unfortunately, the available paleontological evidence for different sexes and juveniles can be even more limited than the examples that defined the species. Just as the original Jurassic Park scientists used frog DNA, when we have missing information, the team looks to the living natural world to fill in the gaps.

For example, looking to modern day birds which fill a similar niche to prehistoric pterosaurs led to creating larger and more colourful crests for the male pterosaurs of some species in game. In another example, when designing juvenile Spinosaurus the team looked at modern baby gharials which have a similar skull shape, leading to juvenile Spinosaurus designs with shorter snouts and bigger eyes.

For juvenile dinosaurs the team also had to consider how they would appear and be interacted with in-game. We didn’t want to design juvenile dinosaurs which were simply scaled down versions of adults. We also had to make sure they were of a size and scale that was suitable for the kinds of social interactions we wanted them to have in game.

Once again in the case of the Psittacosaurus, we were blessed by some fantastic fossil evidence including a large fossil that contains multiple juveniles from Liaoning Province, China. Stunningly this fossil contains an adolescent Psittacosaurus “babysitting” 34 hatchlings, providing a rare glimpse into not only how these dinosaurs looked as they grew, but also how they might have behaved when they were alive.

Our interpretation of this fossil evidence gave the team some fascinating insights including indications that Psittacosaurus primarily walked on all fours as juveniles, before shifting to walking on two legs as adults. Not only did our interpretation of the evidence shape how we designed Psittacosaurus’ appearance, it also played a key role in the pipeline of bringing these dinosaurs into the game, including how they were rigged and animated.

Into the 3rd Dimension

Once the visual design of a dinosaur has been built out in concept art, it moves to our Character Art department to realise these designs as a textured 3D model. Using industry tools, including ZBrush, Maya and Marmoset Toolbag, our talented character artists are free to iterate as they create a dinosaur that looks and feels natural.

The wealth of evidence available for the Psittacosaurus enabled the team to create extremely detailed sculpts and textures to reflect the look and feel of the striation and pattern of its scales.

For Jurassic World Evolution 3, the Character Art team took advantage of some new techniques and technologies to breathe even more life into our dinosaur designs. Subsurface Scattering and Transmission provide an additional layer of realism to the designs, enabling the team to make the dinosaurs feel truly “fleshy.” For our flying reptiles, this also enabled us to create a membrane effect, allowing the sun to pass through the thin skin on the wings and create a more realistic appearance than has been possible in past Jurassic World Evolution games.

Moving Pictures

A key step in making dinosaurs feel alive is their animation.

Unfortunately, as our team aren’t armed with a time machine (yet…), they can’t simply travel back in time and see how dinosaurs moved in real-life, so we once again look to modern day animals for inspiration.

While some dinosaurs do still exist in the form of birds, we often have to look outside of their immediate relatives simply because there is a distinct lack of four-legged birds that weigh multiple tons!

When referencing the natural world, the team try to find examples of behaviour and movement in similarly sized animals that fill the same niche as their dinosaur counterparts. Rhinos and Elephants are a particular staple when designing the movements of large quadruped herbivores.

With juveniles and dimorphism entering the mix, our animation team also had to consider how these different animals move both alone and when they are with each other within their family groups. This meant looking at examples of play and nurture within the animal kingdom, while also paying close reference to how these species have been portrayed in the Jurassic World franchise itself.

The Psittacosaurus presented an interesting challenge for our animation team, with some really unique differences in its appearance and proportions compared to many of our other dinosaurs. This required the team to think outside the box and look to new examples of living animals.

In the end, the animation of the Psittacosaurus has incorporated behaviours from multiple extant animals, including the movement of the tail spines from Malaysian Porcupines, and large horns from Ankole-Watusi Cattle, plus the playful movement and motion of dogs.

With limited evidence on exactly how adult and juvenile dinosaurs interacted, the animation team had a lot of freedom to explore a wide variety of different kinds of interactions, creating distinctions between how our species move and behave.

For juvenile Psittacosaurus, the animation team looked at baby Rhinos and also used piglets as a reference for the first time. The chaotic clumsiness of these animals bringing a lot of personality to these juveniles!

Creating a Prehistoric Sound

The Jurassic World franchise is home to some truly iconic sounds, from the famous T. rex roar to the visceral calls of the Velociraptors, so it was incredibly important to our audio team to meet the standards set by the franchise.

To help us do this, the team at Universal Products and Experiences very kindly shared the sound sources for all the dinosaurs featured throughout the Jurassic World franchise, providing the team with an invaluable starting point to produce our own original sounds.

Much as with the other areas of creating the dinosaurs, settling on the sound for a dinosaur requires looking at both the scientific evidence and the depiction of similar dinosaurs in the franchise to date. This allows the audio team to create sounds which fit and feel at home within the franchise.

When creating a new sound, the audio team pull from a variety of audio sources to build a composite, paying close reference to the existing Jurassic World franchise sounds. For example, when creating a sound for an Allosaurus, they’ use the same audio sources as were used in the films themselves.

To do this the audio team built an extensive library of sounds to draw from, including sources provided by Universal Products and Experiences, animal calls and our own unique recordings.

Creating new audio sources often requires ingenuity from our sound designers, including recording a squeaky shower screen, one of the team’s new puppies, and a vuvuzela. One particularly dedicated sound designer even grew their beard out to a length that could be used as the audio source for a dinosaur scratching themselves.

Once a source has been selected, the audio team then use software and a great deal of skill to augment, blend and modify the audio into a final vocalisation or interaction sound for the dinosaur. This audio is then imported into the game engine using our sound engine Wwise and finetuned to match the dinosaur’s movement and animations using our own proprietary tools.

For Jurassic World Evolution 3, the team also benefited from some new technology, including transform driven Foley which calculates the movement of a dinosaur’s body parts and controls the audio in real time to match the dinosaur’s movement. This enabled the team to add more detail for different movements, such as wingflaps or tail movements.

Finding Our Voice

The introduction of juveniles in Jurassic World Evolution 3 of course also affected the audio team as they produced distinct sound groups for adults and juveniles AND revisited the audio for our returning dinosaurs to make sure that the new sounds were consistent.

Creating juvenile sounds provided an interesting challenge, as the audio team balanced looking at Jurassic World franchise sources, like the young T. rex in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, while also building on the existing audio that had been created for adults. If a lion roar had been used as part of an adult’s audio source, the team would look to a lion cub or other similar young animal for the juvenile’s sound.

The behaviour of living animals also played a factor here as the audio team looked to base the sound in something recognisable. Once again looking at lion cubs, some dinosaur juveniles also exhibit learning behaviours in their vocalisations as they’re too young to have learned how to manage a proper roar.

How this audio is implemented can be crucial as it helps demonstrate the developmental differences between adults and juveniles. For example, some juveniles are more active in their vocalisations as they haven’t recognised the same need for stealth that their parents have.

The audio team identified some key differences in how our dinosaurs change once they mature, like how a Parasaurolophus’ growing resonant chamber impacts their vocalisations or how the quills on the Psittacosaurus might sound different in the smaller tails of juveniles.

Despite its unusual appearance, creating the audio for the Psittacosaurus followed much of the same process as with our other dinosaurs – this time using the slowed down squeaks of Guinea Pigs as an additional vocalisation audio source.  

However, the unique appearance of the Psittacosaurus did require some creative thinking. To construct the audio for the tail, the team combined the sounds made by dried spaghetti and Porcupine quills in a washing up sponge, creating the dry, rustling sounds of the Psittacosaurus quills!

Designing a Living Dinosaur

Now we have a dinosaur that looks and sounds right, the next question is how do we translate that into gameplay?

Every dinosaur in Jurassic World Evolution 3 operates as part of a detailed simulation and that means balancing a wide array of factors that all come together to create believable behaviours in diverse circumstances.

Creating this “dinosaur brain” first requires narrowing down how a particular dinosaur should behave within the framework of the game. For Jurassic World Evolution 2, this was managed by creating monolithic behaviours which defined each species through a set of needs, such as access to a particular kind of food, an enclosure of a particular size etc.  

In Jurassic World Evolution 3 this is greatly expanded with the addition of new social needs and behaviours on top of these existing paleo needs. This has enabled our team to create dinosaurs that not only require different social environments but will also behave differently based on these environments. For example, some dinosaurs will stay close to their children while others may be totally indifferent to their young.

Dinosaurs will now exhibit diverse behaviour between males, females and juveniles, with blood-related parents and family members also behaving differently to unrelated animals. This has been key to making dimorphism and the introduction of juveniles directly impact the gameplay experience, beyond the already expansive visual and audio differences.

With these improvements and expansion of dinosaurs’ behaviour, our designers have once again had to look closely at the natural world. Referencing the behaviour of living species enables the team to not only design behaviours, interactions and systems that have a basis in the real-world, they also ensure that the dinosaurs are behaving in a way that can be easily recognised by players.

As with everything to do with Jurassic World Evolution dinosaurs, this has required a lot of work to bring into reality. Every time a new behaviour or need is introduced it has a knock-on impact to the wider simulation. This can sometimes result in unexpected behaviours, such as small dinosaurs like a Compsognathus standing up to and chasing away a hungry Tyrannosaurus looking to make a meal of their juveniles. Our team needs to carefully balance different needs to make sure the dinosaurs behave as expected once in game.

To design the behaviour of our Psittacosaurus, the design team interpreted the available evidence we have for this dinosaur which indicated herding behaviour, with animals gathering in a close-knit group. This has been directly reflected through their in-game behaviour, with Psittacosaurus in Jurassic World Evolution 3 preferring to live together in small herds with juveniles interacting and engaging with all adults, not just their parents.

Step by Step

From start to finish, the process of bringing dinosaurs to life in Jurassic World Evolution 3 is an iterative process which has required close collaboration across our entire development team. At each stage of this process, the diverse expertise and experience of our teams has resulted in tweaks, adjustments, improvements and iterative changes to deliver a stunning final result.  

Whether as species returning from previous Jurassic World Evolution titles or making their debut in Jurassic World Evolution 3, we are extremely proud to have created new family units of living, breathing dinosaurs that look and behave in a believable way.

Jurassic World Evolution 3 is available to pre-order now and will release on 21 October 2025 for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.