Creating new memories while setting the bar for virtual productions — Disney’s The Lion King roars to a billion-dollar global release in just 19 days.

The remake of this beloved classic brings a whole new generation of viewers deep into the pride lands of Africa to join the journey of the lion cub Simba, as he ventures away from his life with the herd and discovers friendship, love, and ultimately his destiny as king.

The Lion King remake delivers a jaw-dropping visual experience created by the amazingly talented team at MPC Film, who leveraged Quixel Megascans to achieve previously unimaginable levels of photorealism.

We caught up with Elliot Newman, VFX supervisor for The Lion King, and asked him what role Megascans played in the film.

“In terms of scale, this was the largest production of this kind we have taken on to date. The Megascans library helped us surface many miles of geometry based on the many disparate locations in and around Kenya that we used as reference for the environments in the movie.”

Elliot explained how time saved using Megascans enhanced the team’s creative focus.

“The Megascans library allowed us to focus on art directing the surfacing of our rocks and terrain without spending time constructing the maps and UVs ourselves; the result is a more complex looking world and the production was more procedural and artist friendly which made it very easy to make changes and fine tune along the way.”

MPC Film Sets Lead Marco Rolandi echoed these thoughts and said the library helped bring more to the production with relative ease.

“For MPC Film’s work on The Lion King, we leveraged the consistency and variety of the Megascans library to create an array of materials at various scales for the project. This also allowed us to mix the scales up together to achieve even more varietals and complexity. It also saved us time by not having to work on UVs, custom texturing and uprezing.”

Finally, we spoke with Damien Fagnou, SVP Technology & Infrastructure at Technicolor Production Services.

“We continue to love the Megascans library and the sheer amount of improvements and investments made to it by Quixel. [The library] has grown tremendously while still maintaining its industry-leading standard of quality. It’s as groundbreaking as ever, and a true asset for our team.”

MPC’s first foray into a near-complete virtual production was in The Jungle Book (2016). That groundbreaking production was also made utilizing the Megascans asset library. The library was dubbed an “an invaluable resource” for the project by Damien (then CTO for MPC).

The Lion King truly represents the state of tech when it comes to creating photoreal virtual worlds, and Quixel is proud to work with partners like MPC to define this new reality.

Discover the latest additions to Megascans.