Top-Class CG Techniques in Asia—Mr. Go

The popular gorilla Ling-ling in Mr. Go is the first virtual character created by using motion capture in Asia. This film’s CG is done by Dexter Films visual effects studio with effects of 180 crew members for 1,420 days. Let’s take a look the production of Ling-ling and see the progress Korean FX house has made and the difficulties they met.

Character Production.

90% shots of this film has to be done by visual effects and almost all 3D professionals in Korea have gathered together to work for Mr. Go. The time it used before shooting till finishing post-production was about 28 months. The time for production and preparations is not far from Hollywood production. Yet the number of staff is much less than Hollywood production. Usually the number of VFX staff is about 800 to 1,000 for Hollywood production. But Mr. Go only used 180 people.

During preparation, director and his crew member visited safari parks many times for observing gorilla’s actions and habits. Then the team spent about 12 months to train for motion capture of gorilla’s cameras. And to conveniently study the look of gorilla in reality, the team also made two real-size gorilla models. There are about 1.000 gorilla cameras which are difficult to finish even for Hollywood technology. To accomplish this target, Dexter Films has created a plug-in to process and render the gorilla’s fur and hair named Zelos Fur. This plug-in has played an important role. The team spent 18 months to this in-house plug-in which is able to process 2.000.000 pieces of hairs at one go. Comparing with other software, this one is able to do calculations very fast.

To achieve expecting effects, most of studios prefer to develop their own in-house plug-in based on the needs of projects. Dexter Films is one of these studios. To ensure the movie coming out with excellent visual effects, in-house plug-in is not the only important element, the same important is render farm with cloud rendering. Even though the plug-in can process 2.000.000 pieces of hairs at one go, this cannot be done without the help of powerful hardware since the amount of calculation is so huge which requires mass storage and powerful workstations. Sometimes some studios may not have enough workstations to render their project so that they can catch up with deadline. This is exactly the time when an online render farm will do its magic. Fox Renderfarm with blender render farm, maya render farm, good render farm software, vray render farm and 3ds max render farm etc., which has powerful hardware and supports mostly used 3D applications. Even with in-house plug-in, Fox Renderfarm can install it on servers so that our users can enjoy the perfect cloud render farm service. Beside the standard render service and unlimited render service, Fox Renderfarm also provide pure server rental which will suit different needs of different studios. For more details please visit our website www.foxrenderfarm.com.