The Jungle Book: art-directing procedural scatters in rich environments

Disney's live action remake of The Jungle Book required us to build photorealistic, organic and complex jungle environments. We developed a geometry distributor with which artists could dress a large number of very diverse CG sets. It was used in over 800 shots to scatter elements, ranging from debris to entire trees. Per object attributes were configurable and the distribution was driven by procedural shaders and custom maps. This paper describes how the system worked and demonstrates the efficiency and effectiveness of the workflows which originated from it. We will present a number of scenarios where this pipelined, semi-procedural strategy for set dressing was crucial to the creation of high-quality environments.