Slashdot Mirror
How 'The Jungle Book' Made Its Animals Look So Real With Groundbreaking VFX (inverse.com)
An anonymous reader shares an article on Inverse that looks into how The Jungle Book movie was made. Following are some of the interesting tidbits from the story: Directed by Jon Favreau, this version of The Jungle Book, which borrows from both Disney's 1967 cartoon and the original Rudyard Kipling novel, sets a new standard for life-like CGI animals. Shot entirely on a soundstage in downtown Los Angeles, it is sort of a hybrid of Avatar and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, with one human performer surrounded by animated creatures -- the difference being that every effort was made to trick the audience into believing the animals were real. [...] For the most complicated scenes, the computational power required was astounding. "It would take 30-40 hours per frame, and since it's stereo [or 3D], it requires two frames to produce one frame of the movie -- at 2K, not even 4K," Oscar-winning visual effects director Rob Legato said. "So you can tell how much the computer has to figure out, exactly what it's doing, how it's bouncing, how much of the light is absorbed, because when it hits an object, some gets absorbed and some gets reflected." The math there is mind-boggling; it takes a full 24 frames to make up a single second of the movie, and most shots are between five and ten seconds. That required "literally thousands of computers," Legato said, and eventually, some creative solutions. "I think they started using the Google cloud, which has tens of thousands of computers, and sometimes it would take two or three days to render a shot, he said, exasperated at the mere thought of the process. As powerful as the computers were, they ultimately were just taking cues from the human innovators who spent years on the film. "In all this," Legato said, "there's no real computer that replaces the skill of the operator, of the person who is pushing the buttons."
That required "literally thousands of computers,"
Thank goodness it didn't require any figurative computers. I'm not sure how you'd get those.
Ask Kipling.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Do you like Kipling?
I don't know, I've never kippled.
Just curious. We as human are so intune to relate with humans, that a CG Human would look lifeless and fake, especially when animated. Non-Humans not so much so, as we don't relate on the same level. But would a bear watching it have a uncanny valley when seeing another bear?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
i want to identify as a man, man-cub
I feel, this is probably one movie I don't need to watch. As you said, the story is likely to take a back seat to the visual effects.
And maybe, it's just me but seeing the previews, it felt extremely jarring. The visual effects are so much on the wrong side of the uncanny valley. It is glaringly obvious that all the animals and a lot of the background is CGI rather than real objects. And to me it feels very disturbing and distracting. Of course, if there is no story to distract from, then maybe that doesn't matter as much...
"So you can tell how much the computer has to figure out, exactly what it's doing, how it's bouncing, how much of the light is absorbed, because when it hits an object, some gets absorbed and some gets reflected."
He's so in awe of this you probably shouldn't mention that reflected light can hit another object and keep reflecting... possibly mixing with light from a complete different source in the process.
MIND == BLOWN
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So we're, say, about five years away from no longer having any way of knowing what we're shown is true or total fiction...
Then what?
Apparently it's good, according to critics and users?
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/...
This isn't about the quality of the story, the human actors, or the script itself, it's about the tech being used to solve a problem. You can, on occasion, have a technical masterpiece which has nothing to do with the value of the actual project it was meant to accommodate.
There are two types of people in the world; those who believe there are two types of people, and those who don't.
Disney ran out of other people's intellectual property to rip off, so now they're ripping off their own? This movie will run into all the same traps that all movies which anthropmorphicize wild animals run into. My favorite is Zootopia: what exactly do all the carnivores eat, when ALL animals have evolved into hominids?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Or, maybe they are just proud of the tech and want to showcase a particularly challenging and interesting component of the film. Are you saying a good movie wouldn't talk about their 'breakthrough' special effects?
There are two types of people in the world; those who believe there are two types of people, and those who don't.
>> Are you saying a good movie wouldn't talk about their 'breakthrough' special effects?
I'm saying its 2015 and we're so used to CGI powering fantasy movies that no one cares about "breakthrough" special effects - they're expected. And, if they're your main story about your movie, your movie probably sucks. (What was the last "good" movie you know that was primarily marketed on its special effects?)
Ball park numbers:
35 hours per frame
120 frames per second (2x 60 fps)
7200 seconds (2 hours) per movie
= 30,240,000 hours to render the movie
= 3452 years
I'm sure they have a cluster of computers dividing up the workload, but still...
The "monkey" was actually voiced by Louis Prima (a Sicillian) who was actually a pretty famous jazz musician and singer. He wrote and composed Sing Sing Sing, probably the most widely known swing song.
About the same computational time (for some definitions) as Tron
>> The film only made $291 million at the boxoffice worldwide on opening weekend
It's out already? Guess I missed the advertisement.
Indeed, what takes 30-40 hours/frame to render has changed significantly since I was peripherally involved in the field almost thirty years ago. Rendering is one of the few areas that really need all the computing resources you can provide and fortunately it's able to leverage parallelism.
I don't know how much cleverness is used -- things don't change that much in 1/24th of a second -- but I'm guessing there's still a lot of brute force computation. Directing becomes more critical in these efforts as the actors are essentially digital automatons -- hence the "human innovators".
conclusion was that it is OK to ban Kipling's work
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Didn't they try that with Avatar?
Back then everyone decided that special effects be dammed, a big blockbuster movie does actually need a (non-plagiarised) story.
It doesn't have to be, I recall reading a similar article about Titanic and how it was rendered on thousands of linux boxes and how this was one of the ways linux broke into Hollywood as inexpensive server farms.
Didn't they try that with Avatar?
Back then everyone decided that special effects be dammed, a big blockbuster movie does actually need a (non-plagiarised) story.
No, the lesson of Avatar was exactly the opposite. The story was completely unoriginal (except for Pocahontas being ten feet tall and blue), but it grossed nearly $3 Billion, and was the most financially successful movie ever. That was purely because of the spectacular (for 2009) special effects. If the eye candy is good enough, the story doesn't matter.
Better since they added the car chases and shoot-outs.
Making a slow but accurate rendering engine is easy. The equations are relatively simple, the rest is simply a lot of iterations on crazy detailed model.
Making a fast but good looking and sufficiently accurate engine is fucking hard.
From the summary, it looks like the team went with the bruteforce approach, which is fine, but not something to brag about IMHO. They even imply that it takes twice as long to render from two very close viewpoints (stereo). I'm surprised they can't manage to exploit the correlation between the two.
Except that doesn't seem to have been their motive. You are right, a lot of people don't care about "breakthrough" special effects, but they do tend to be dismissive about yet another film where talking animals prevent an audience's suspense of disbelief.
Have a quick read of this article for more: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04...
There are two types of people in the world; those who believe there are two types of people, and those who don't.
[It's glaringly obvious that all the animals aren't real.]
You mean aside from when they talk?
I think we crossed that mark in the past. At this point we're just reducing the turnaround time for the fakes.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Yes but fewer child actors get eaten this way.
Nullius in verba
Says the person who was so afraid I'd see what they wrote they posted AC...
News flash : A post as funny as mine took LITERALLY no effort to compose.
MIND == DOUBLE BLOWN
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No matter how much computing power they throw at rendering the result has always sucked.
2011. The year Gnome decided Linux will never be on the desktop.
Yawn. All that effort, and yet it's still the same basic story as fifty years ago. Lots of tech... zero creativity.
Proverbs 21:19
I'm saying its 2015 and we're so used to CGI powering fantasy movies that no one cares about "breakthrough" special effects - they're expected. And, if they're your main story about your movie, your movie probably sucks. (What was the last "good" movie you know that was primarily marketed on its special effects?)
Inception. The commercials all seemed to focus on the impossible dream sequence special effects. They weren't incredible, but that's how the movie was marketed. What's the last movie marketed on its special effects that actually had impressive special effects for the time? TRON.
According to IMDB: "Jazz singer Louis Armstrong was originally set to voice King Louie but another jazz singer Louis Prima was cast instead after Walt Disney feared that the idea of Armstrong who was African-American to play an ape would make the audience find the film racist."
But would a bear watching it have a uncanny valley when seeing another bear?
It depends on two factor:
- which sense does the considered animal use to perceive the world and other individual of the same specie?
As mentioned, we human are quasi exclusively visual, with some auditive perception (voice) thrown in too, whereas other animal rely on other sense or other interpretations of sense. (e.g.: some snakes have infrared perception and use it to recognise other animal. They would not recognize a mouse if it were cold)
- how is the social structure of the animal, how much does it need to recognise others and does it have a concept of "Uncanny valley".
In humans, it plays (among other) a role of instinctive/inate xenophobia (due to the "US vs Them" mentality that played an important role back when we were living in small packs/tribes) : if it looks almost like us but not quite exactly, chances are that it comes from another pack/tribe, therefore it is a direct competitor to us and we must hate it/fight it.
(Side note: sadly some of our stupidest contemporary brethren seem not to have evolved much since then and still believe racism is a thing, even now when the society has evolved and globalised to the point where "tribe" now covers nearly all the few billions humans on the planet, which should all stick together if we want to still have some hope to survive as a specie)
So it all boils down to:
- will the considered animal recognise the CGI representation as another animal of the same specie?
- and does is have an inate "uncanny valley" mechanism?
e.g: House cats.
- House cats are enough visual (nearly like us) so they will also recognise movie depiction of cats as "cats" (and also other felidae, due to the scale on the TV screen. They will also recognise movie depiction of lions).
- Cats have complex behaviour which, among other depends on the availability of resources. When there's enough shelter and food for everyone, they'll tolerate other individuals without excessive fuss. (That's how feral cat colonies form). They'll even collectively raise kittens (probable evolutionary explanation: due to the reproductive patterns of cats, when there are kittens around, chance are high that they're somewhat related, and helping raising them helps proliferate more copies of the same genes).
So house cats are likely to try calling movie representation of cats to play with them (in my experience) (they'll also try call lions).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
You mean aside from when they talk?
I know. I felt the same thing while watching the version from 1967. The animals look so fake.
Here's my datum. Saw it Saturday afternoon. Expected a lot of CGI. No glaring cases of cringey animation I can recall. Mouths seemed to be in sync.
BUT - at no time did I expect 100% CGI. Several times I looked at an animal - mainly the wolves - and said to myself the bodies were likely real wolves, with the heads CGI-ed for acting purposes. The hair, musculature, movements, etc. were just... wolfy. When Bagheera (panther) chases Mowgli through the trees, I assumed most of the running action was a stunt animal, and the up-close conversation was CGI.
I guess my "review" is that, unless you're there just to nit-pick, most everything just looks... natural. Oh, and the story? You already know it. But it's a fine implementation of the reference spec. A little more savage than I expected honestly!
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
Yeah, that's what H-1B's are for.
Table-ized A.I.
The new stuff has absolutely no "character" or heart in it.
The ASCII art version has plenty of characters in it.
/. refugees on Usenet: news:comp.misc
So, I herd u liek mud kipling?
Err... Let me just apologize in advance for that. I'm sorry - but not sorry enough to not do it.
On a more serious note, I bet the rendering farm for this was AWESOME!!! Holy crap... I've seen some previews for the movie and the first thing I thought of was the rendering farm. Wait, no, the first thing I thought of was the original. The second thing I thought of was that I was singing "The Bear Necessities" aloud. The third thing I thought of was probably the rendering farm. I actually went looking to see if anything had been put up online about it but, alas, I found nothing at the time.
That must have taken some serious horsepower. It probably used enough electricity to power a small city for a while. As wasteful as that might be, or seem, it's still very awesome.
As an aside; As a marginally old dude, it's great to have witnessed the vast changes that have taken place during my lifetime. It really is. I don't think it's quite on par with seeing the phone, electricity, powered flight, automobiles, and that sort of stuff - in one lifetime... But, damn, it's kind of close. From a man on the moon to a supercomputer in our pockets. I wonder what my kids will say when they're my age and looking back.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
> How 'The Jungle Book' Made Its Animals Look
The trailers I've seen look terrible. As is too often the case, the kinematics are just *wrong*.
Maybe try to use live animals and just animate the mouths?
That doesn't work for a few reasons:
*) Animals can only rarely be directed, and many films with large animal casts tend to be expensive boondoggles because real animals cause delays. Real animals don't do what the writer/director wants. Real animals put together on set can attack and kill each other. Real animals are extremely difficult to film. Given the sheer number of animal shots used in the Jungle Book, as well as the -type- of shots they were able to get.. yeah. That was not going to happen with real animals, not unless the budget ballooned from its already-high value.
*) Remember that Conan O'Brien skit (many others have done this as well) where they show a picture of a celebrity's face, and super-impose a different person's speaking mouth on them? Sure, it was intended to look bad, but it also illustrates a truth: speaking is more than just lips and jaw moving. Animating just the mouth has never been convincing. You need the body language as well. If you want a "performance," a real animal is just not going to give it to you.
From TFA
They were a bit hamstrung when it came to replicating the animalsâ(TM) movements. Disney is no longer permitted to bring exotic animals into studios to help animatorsâ(TM) research
If they can't bring them in for research then I highly doubt they could bring them in to film
Moore's Law has slowed, but Blinn's Law has not. Render times will only get longer in the near term.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
For The Jungle Book, lots of people have seen bears, tigers, and all sorts of Earth animals and plants. Why should I see familiar creatures tell a familiar story?
Because you've never seen them exactly how the director wants you to see them.
There's a reason some call it "Eye Porn". Those things are never really lauded for their story either.
It goes back farther than Playboy.
That's true. But I still don't think that the King Louie that Louis Prima voiced was "supposed to be" a cool black guy, unless Louis Prima was trying to be a cool black guy, even though King Louie was originally "supposed to be a" cool black guy (Louis Armstrong), in a different sense of phrase "supposed to be".