Before a single bull charged into battle or an elephant took its final breath, months of planning, previs and painstaking digital craftsmanship had already played out behind the scenes. Every great battle begins long before swords clash. In Raja Shivaji, it began with a conversation. Not about software. Not about render farms. Not even about visual effects. It started with emotion.
Before a single storyboard was drawn or a CG bull charged across the screen, director Ritesh Deshmukh gathered the visual effects team to explain one thing: how he wanted audiences to feel. Finally, what you see on-screen is the tireless effort of Assemblage Entertainment’s VFX team who transformed the director’s imagination into one of the film’s most ambitious creature spectacles.
That distinction became the foundation of one of the film’s most technically demanding sequences, a brutal bull assault that would eventually evolve into a complex blend of stunt choreography, Unreal Engine previs, virtual production, creature simulation, digital environments and painstaking compositing.
During a recent discussion, Assemblage Entertainment CG co-head Vidit Kundra rolled back the curtain to unveil the making of the sequence, revealing that the spectacle audiences witnessed on screen was less about software wizardry and more about relentless planning, collaboration and iteration.
Projects like Raja Shivaji, become memorable experiences for everyone involved in the process of building the beautiful narrative.
The vision comes first, the pixels later
Every VFX-heavy film begins with a director’s brief. But according to the team, Ritesh Deshmukh’s approach was refreshingly different. Rather than dictating how artists should execute the sequence, he focused on storytelling.
“He never told us how to build the visual effects,” Kundra explained. “He told us what he wanted the audience to experience.”
That creative freedom proved invaluable. The initial discussions revolved around mood, pacing and impact rather than technical workflows. Storyboards became the first visual language, translating the director’s ideas into tangible frames before the technical departments took over.
The process, he said, wasn’t simply about creating photorealistic animals. It was about ensuring every visual beat served the story.
Where every fight is rehearsed twice
Long before actors stepped onto set, the action unfolded inside a rehearsal space. Welcome to the world of stuntvis. If previs determines where cameras move, stuntvis determine how bodies move.
Fight masters, stunt coordinators, the director and the VFX supervisors collaborated to choreograph every collision, every leap and every charge long before production began. Working inside a relatively small rehearsal area, the team blocked the entire battle using performers standing in for actors and digital creatures.
The exercise served several purposes. It identified where wire work would be required, established actor safety and determined camera positions. And, perhaps most importantly, it revealed where visual effects would eventually take over.
“The stuntvis becomes the blueprint,” he explained. “Once you know what action is happening, every department, from stunts to VFX to art, all can begin planning together.”
When ‘good enough’ wasn’t good enough
The original stuntvis already communicated the action.
But Deshmukh wanted something bigger. He challenged the VFX artists to push beyond choreography and create memorable cinematic moments.
“He wanted shots people hadn’t seen before,” Kundra recalled.
Instead of treating the previs as a technical exercise, the artists began treating it as another stage of filmmaking. They expanded action beats, experimented with camera language and introduced more dramatic interactions between soldiers and charging bulls. Most importantly, they identified narrative moments where each impact could heighten the emotional stakes rather than simply add spectacle.
The sequence stopped being “bulls running through soldiers”. It became a carefully orchestrated series of visual storytelling moments.
Learning from Spain and bringing it home
Creating believable digital animals demanded extensive research.
The team studied Spanish bullfighting footage to understand movement, acceleration and the terrifying momentum of charging animals. They also analysed Indian bull races, observing body mechanics, muscle behaviour and the rhythm of the animals in motion.
Yet references only provided the vocabulary. The final performance still had to be created by animators.
“There wasn’t one specific bull we copied,” Kundra explained. “The director wanted a powerful Indian bull with distinctive forward-pointing horns. The look was very carefully designed.”
Instead of replicating reality, the artists distilled it. The result was a creature grounded in realism while carrying the mythic presence the film demanded.
Previs enters the Unreal
Once storyboards and stuntvis were approved, the team shifted into Unreal Engine. Far from being a flashy game engine demo, Unreal became an essential filmmaking tool.
The virtual environment allowed the filmmakers to test: camera movements, bull entrances, fight choreography, environmental scale, dramatic timing and shot continuity. Every digital rehearsal answered questions that would otherwise have been solved during expensive shoot days.
Even the dimensions of the physical set were determined using Unreal previs.
“We could measure exactly how large the set needed to be and how much space the bulls would require.”
The result was fewer surprises during production and considerably more confidence once cameras rolled.
Building a battlefield before building the battle
Previs didn’t simply help the VFX department. It became a common language shared by multiple teams.
Art directors used it to design the physical environment. Stunt coordinators refined action and camera teams rehearsed movements.
International VFX partner CineSite joined the planning process to help translate the digital concepts into achievable photography. The collaboration, according to Kundra, dramatically elevated the final sequence.
Rather than solving problems independently, departments were solving them together. That level of coordination would later prove invaluable during principal photography.
Shoot day becomes execution day
By the time cameras rolled, very little was left to chance.
Months of planning meant the crew already knew: where each bull would enter, which shots required interaction, where performers would be positioned, which moments would rely on CG, which actions required safety padding and how individual plates would later be stitched together.
Some shots even required actors to perform against padded practical rigs before clean plates were captured without the equipment. The careful planning dramatically reduced uncertainty on set.
What appeared chaotic on screen had, in reality, been meticulously choreographed months in advance.
Among the most unexpected heroes on set wasn’t an actor, a camera or even a computer. It was a blue stuffed bull.
While audiences eventually saw towering, muscular digital creatures charging across Purandar fort, the cast performed against a life-sized blue mock-up that represented the animal’s physical presence.
The prop served a simple but vital purpose.
It gave actors an accurate eyeline, helped stunt performers judge timing and distance, and allowed cinematographers to understand how much of the frame the enormous creature would eventually occupy.
“It sounds simple,” he said, “but having the correct scale on set changes everything. It tells everyone where the bull is, how fast it’s moving and how much space it occupies.”
For a sequence involving multiple charging animals, scale was every bit as important as animation.
Three little spheres that make all the difference
To most people on set, they look like oddly coloured balls. To a VFX artist, they are priceless.
Throughout the shoot, the crew meticulously photographed chrome balls, grey balls and Macbeth colour charts before filming every key setup. These seemingly mundane tools became the bridge between the physical and digital worlds.
The chrome ball captured reflections from the surrounding environment, allowing artists to recreate how light would bounce across the digital bull’s skin and horns. The grey ball recorded the quality and direction of the light, ensuring the CG creatures responded to illumination exactly as the actors did. Meanwhile, the Macbeth colour chart provided a colour calibration reference, helping software such as Maya and Houdini faithfully reproduce the lighting conditions captured by the camera.
“It’s our way of calibrating the digital world,” Kundra explained. “Without those references, matching CG to live action becomes guesswork.”
The production’s lighting presented another challenge.
Deshmukh wanted the battlefield to feel enclosed rather than sun-drenched, with soft shadows replacing harsh daylight. Every lighting reference gathered on set became crucial in recreating that atmosphere inside the computer.
The edit begins before the animation does
Once principal photography wrapped, the VFX team didn’t immediately begin animating. Instead, they assembled a comprehensive post visualisation edit.
Every plate, every stunt pass and every camera angle was cut together to establish rhythm before expensive animation work commenced.
This intermediate stage allowed the team to refine pacing, adjust continuity and determine precisely where digital creatures would appear.
One particularly ambitious shot, initially conceived as a partially CG sequence, would eventually evolve into a completely computer-generated shot as the edit progressed.
Postvis became more than a preview. It became the creative blueprint for every department that followed.
The anatomy of a digital beast
Creating a convincing bull wasn’t simply a modelling exercise. It was biology.
The creature underwent months of design exploration before its appearance was finalised. Deshmukh personally selected everything from facial characteristics and horn shapes to the tail design, ensuring the animal possessed both authenticity and cinematic personality.
From there, the technical work began. Using Houdini, artists constructed a sophisticated anatomical framework that mirrored real muscle, tissue and skin behaviour.
Only after those internal systems functioned correctly did the team move on to fur grooming, skin shading and final rendering. The result was not merely a photorealistic animal but a physically believable one.
Every muscle contraction, every ripple beneath the skin and every shift in weight responded naturally to movement. The illusion depended less on surface detail than on what lay underneath.
One bull? Try dozens of performances
Perhaps the biggest misconception about creature animation is that artists animate every shot from scratch. In reality, they build a library of performances first.
The team developed multiple behavioural cycles for several variants of the bull, including head-shake cycles, running cycles, hopping cycles and interaction cycles. These reusable animations became the building blocks for more complex performances.
When a shot demanded a bull tossing soldiers into the air, colliding with objects or reacting to specific actors, animators layered bespoke animation over these foundational cycles.
“It’s never a case of opening a shot and animating from frame one,” Kundra explained. “You build a vocabulary of movement first.”
That modular approach dramatically improved both efficiency and consistency across the sequence.
When the real fort wasn’t enough
Sometimes the physical set simply runs out of road. One extended tracking shot followed the charging bulls across the battlefield before revealing the wider landscape around Purandar fort.
The problem was that the practical set ended long before the camera did. Rather than stitching together multiple environments, the VFX team made a bold decision. They rebuilt the entire section digitally.
Walls were reconstructed, the ground was remodelled, surrounding terrain was redesigned and additional mountains were introduced.
The digital terrain also allowed the artists to create convincing interactions between the bulls and the environment, dust clouds, hoof impacts and terrain deformation, that would have been impossible to achieve in the practical location.
“We realised rebuilding the entire environment gave us far greater control,” he said. “It wasn’t an especially complex set, so creating it in CG actually became the better option.”
The decision blurred the line between production design and visual effects, with digital environments seamlessly replacing physical construction.
Making actors and animals believe in each other
Creating believable creatures is only half the battle. Making audiences believe they share the same space as live actors is another challenge entirely.
Matching performances proved to be one of the sequence’s most labour-intensive tasks. Every interaction required countless rounds of animation refinement, dust simulations and compositing before the digital bulls finally appeared rooted in the photographed environment.
“There was an enormous amount of animation and compositing work,” he admitted. “Only once the dust, lighting and interactions came together did everything finally feel real.”
Ironically, the most convincing visual effects are often the least noticeable.
From charging bulls to a dying elephant
The presentation then shifted from raw aggression to quiet tragedy. Another major creature challenge involved Afzal Khan’s elephant.
Unlike the bull sequence, the elephant required neither elaborate previs nor complex stuntvis. The action itself was comparatively straightforward.
What wasn’t straightforward was creating a convincing death. The team again relied on practical performers during filming to establish timing and movement cues before replacing the animal entirely with a digital counterpart.
As with the bull, anatomical accuracy came first. The focus was on the skeleton, muscles, tissue simulation and skin. Every internal layer had to behave exactly as a real elephant would.
The artists credited lessons learned while working on Chhaava, where physically accurate muscle simulations proved critical to achieving convincing creature animation.
Animating what nobody has ever filmed
The elephant sequence presented a unique artistic dilemma. Unlike walking, running or charging, there is remarkably little usable reference footage of an elephant collapsing during battle.
That meant the animation had to be imagined rather than using any reference.
“You’re not really watching footage of an elephant dying,” Kundra observed. “That’s where artistry takes over.”
Animators spent weeks refining subtle details that audiences might never consciously notice.
How does the enormous body lose balance? Which leg buckles first? How much momentum carries through the torso? How does the head strike the ground?
Every iteration required fresh simulations, renders and compositing passes before another review. Many versions failed and some of them came close.
Only after countless refinements did the movement finally convey the immense weight and emotional gravity the filmmakers sought.
Technology may power the pipeline but people create the magic
Throughout the presentation, one message surfaced repeatedly.
The industry’s most sophisticated software, whether Unreal Engine, Houdini, Maya or advanced compositing tools, didn’t create the sequence on its own. Planning did. It involved precise collaboration and iterations.
Every spectacular shot was the product of hundreds of creative decisions made long before audiences ever saw a charging bull or a collapsing elephant. The software accelerated the process, but it was artists who supplied instinct, judgement and imagination.
Because in the end, believable creatures are not built by algorithms. They are built by people willing to spend weeks perfecting a single movement, months planning a single sequence and years mastering a craft that audiences only notice when it disappears into the story.
For Raja Shivaji, the greatest visual effect wasn’t making audiences see digital animals. It was making them forget they were digital at all.
