"Artist Creates 3D Dinos in Grass Valley Studio"
By Allan Stein - Tuesday, November 3, 1998

It took nature eons to make dinosaurs, but Tim Elston needed only a few seconds to bring a Tyrannosaurus rex back from extinction.
He didn’t do it by cloning dinosaur DNA. Sitting behind a 21-inch color computer screen, Elston pushed some buttons on his keyboard and the terrible lizard’s digital "skeleton" emerged from cyberspace.

With a click of his computer mouse he added skin, color, and texture to the prehistoric animal. The only thing missing from the scene now was background light. Click, click. Light.

The T-rex is one of 30 computer-generated dinosaurs Elston is building in a 3D slide presentation for use by the Museum of Ancient and Modern Art in Penn Valley.

Elston, a professional computer animator and museum volunteer, is also building an Internet "digital museum" for MAMA. It will feature interactive tours of ancient sites such as Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids at Giza. With computer technology Elston bridges the gap between reality and virtual reality in the peace and quiet of his Grass Valley home. He is largely self-taught, having honed his computer skills over the past 12 years.

His home workspace is a big, dimly lit room inhabited by four humming computers and shelves filled with books on computers, animals, airplanes, and dinosaurs — anything that can help Elston capture the essence of his subjects with accuracy.

"It’s so easy to get caught up in this stuff," said Elston, 44, a quiet-spoken man in steel-rimmed glasses and a blond ponytail. A native of Sharon, Pa., Elston studied graphic design at Penn State University before moving to Los Angeles in 1976. In Los Angeles, he took many classes in art and animation before he landed a job animating cartoons for Hanna-Barbera, Filmation and

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other studios. Some of the Saturday morning cartoons he worked on included "He-Man and She-ra, Masters of the Universe," "Lord of the Rings," "Fat Albert," Flash Gordon," and "Smurfs."

He also worked on television commercials featuring "Tony the Tiger." In 1986, he called it quits in LA and moved to Grass Valley to pursue his own career path.

"It was fun working with all the different projects (in Los Angeles) because each project was different," Elston said. "But I didn’t want to wake up one day in my 70s realizing I had given the best part of my life and not having done what I wanted to do."

Commercial art pays the bills, he said, but creative art feeds the soul. Today, Elston keeps several commercial and personal projects going at the same time. He now works for Market Power, a software developer in Nevada City, while pursuing special projects with Lin Larsen of Grass Valley, an accomplished animator/director whose work includes many Disney features including "The Jungle Book."
Elston got attracted to CG dinosaurs by building a collection of 35 3D animated dinosaurs for OMSI (Oregon Museum of Sceince and Industry) 6 years ago for a project called "Dinosaur Safari." Elston also worked with a team to produce "Captain Quazar," a computer software game in which the blond, musclebound superhero tries to restore harmony to the galaxy. He also produced a computer animation segment for Apple computers.

"To me, there needs to be a balance between (commercial and personal art). It’s very hard to be a starving computer artist," Elston said. Elston has been using his computer skills to enhance MAMA’s educational programs as a volunteer since 1988. He sees interactive museums as the technological wave of the future, and the window to new creative possibilities for himself.