Jumanji - Dromedaries

Jumanji: The Next Level is the fourth installment of the franchise that began in 1991. I've always had a soft spot for the original movie with Robin Williams, which perfectly captures the essence of 90s cinematography.

On this project, I was responsible for the look development of six dromedaries that had been filmed on set. These animals proved challenging to direct precisely, so we asked to create CG doubles to allow more precise control in post-production.

Each dromedary had its own unique characteristics in terms of fur, color, and dirt, making this one of my most challenging groom tasks to date. Achieving the right look for the fur was particularly demanding due to the long render times caused by fur sampling, as well as the back-and-forth with both groom and texture artists. We used a lot of masks to drive the melanin values in the hair shading. The Arnold hair shader doesn't react accurately when using a simple diffuse texture, so I had to adjust most of the textures in shading, ensuring the values matched what the rendering software required. I ended up reworking much of the texturing myself using masks, while collaborating closely with the texture artist to align everything with the references.

I also created groups of nodes to introduce randomness in the hair color, adding subtle variations of grey and black to achieve a more natural look.

We worked hard to push the realism, especially alongside the modeling artist, Philip Harris-Genois. One silly detail we tried adding using masks and displacement was eye mucus in the fur next to the eye edge — our supervisor was pleasantly surprised to see that we had captured such a small detail from the reference material.

A significant part of the process involved collaborating with the groom artists, Steve Beaucamp and Julien Jude, to get turntables showcasing all the groom attributes they were outputting for me to work with. At the time, many of these groom attributes weren’t streamlined, and some weren’t fully utilized because they weren’t well understood.

It was a pleasure to help bring these fluffy creatures to life on screen working with all those talented artists.