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."

Comments

Re:That's nice.

[jratcliffe]

Do you like Kipling?

I don't know, I've never kippled.

Would a bear detect the uncanny valley?

[jellomizer]

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?

Re:Would a bear detect the uncanny valley?

[rilister]

That's an interesting question - going by my experience with my dog and FaceTime, he doesn't have the ability to process a 2-D image as a representation of a living 3D thing. That's not a trivial thing - very young children can't do it either. Figuring out that a flat image at the wrong scale, with perspective distortion, lighting artifacts, reflections etc is equivalent to a real creature is (I think) a learned skill.

When it comes to dogs (and maybe bears) I always assumes that partly because although we are creatures where our visual sense is our primary sense (if it looks like a thing, I'm prepared to ignore my other senses), for dogs smell is much more important. Obviously, a flat screen image smells nothing like the thing it represents, so I suspect a dog will discard the vague similarity easily.

Still, I think other people have different experiences with their pets and Skype, so maybe it's possible. But dogs live in our world and have lots of opportunities to learn (eg. to recognize our voices). But it's a complex cognitive challenge.

Re:Would a bear detect the uncanny valley?

[geantvert]

Also, the Red, Green and Blue components used to reproduce colors are finely tuned to match the absorption rates of the 3 types of cones found in the human eye.

Simply speaking, the colors in our movies and photographs are probably quite unrealistic for most non-human life forms.

     

Re:That's nice.

[Phics]

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.

Re:cool CGI, but looks like it has no soul

[TsuruchiBrian]

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.

Re:That's nice.

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

Slow rendering is a good thing now?

[GuB-42]

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.

Re:Literally

[BradleyUffner]

I guess that actually works if you count Virtual Machines as "Figurative" computers.

Re:Literally

[wonkey_monkey]

There is no difference between "literally thousands" and just "thousands".

There is if you consider that "thousands of" often gets used metaphorically as a synonym for "many."

I've told people about this thousands of times, but they literally never listen to me.

Re:That's nice.

[GTRacer]

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!