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| A journey of a billion frames begins with talent, characters and a whole lot of effort by the team at DreamWorks.
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 wash with color and technical complexities,
DreamWorks brings us their next animated film,
Kung Fu Panda. In production since 2003, the film introduces a cast of clothed and furry or feathery animals that never completely sit still, languishing, dreaming, learning, and battling throughout a collection of expansive environments.
The script contained everything DreamWorks had done before, magnified, to the point of when the head of production handed the script to VFX Supervisor Markus Manninen, she laughed and wished him “good luck”.
“When we started talking,” said Manninen, “the movie was still a high concept. But for everyone that looked at it, it screamed complexity. We launched off saying, how can you make this movie tangible? How can you find smart ways to bring this world to life in a way that makes it a great movie and not feel like the complexity becomes the driver of the story, but the story and the emotion being the driver?”
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They started with extensive previs, using it as a creative process, finding a way to use space and dimension for storytelling and solutions for each dramatic sequence that felt unique and interesting. “That is the style of the film; variety within the artistic rules of the film.”
Production designer Ramone Zibach and Tang Heng, art director, took inspiration from films like 'Hero' and 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' but also from the artistic choices made in Chinese Asian art and the world that inspired it.
Zibach was quite particular with the way he wanted the emotional beats to land and color to tell the story, creating a theatrical aspect to the coloring and lighting of this film, an interesting mix between staged lighting techniques and artistic choices.
It all came together in the expansive world in the form of lots of atmospheric layered vistas. Said Manninen, “We worked closely with our R&D, technology, and systems departments to developed a technique for realtime lighting, called mini farm, to allow a lighter to utilize a portion of the render farm to get interactivity when lighting through the parallelizing, the application, and the renderer.”
Emotion was important to the film. In a scene where the terrible Tai Lung is fighting Shifu, the shift in mood was played up by designing the exterior and interior differently. The interior, a room of great wisdom and honor, had a cyan look, not just from the interior pool, but from the light that the pool emitted,. However, outside it was desaturated, with a strong cyan/green horizon line that defined the dramatic graphic look.
For the interior battle scene, Zibach created interesting keys to dissect and find the theory behind the environment. He wanted the effect to feel as if the floor was made of jade with light seeping through it. Sequence CG Supervisor Aaron Smith and his lighting leads developed a balance between making the characters underlit without making the characters float.
The outside vistas were mostly handled with matte paintings, intended to appear as expansive as possible. “Our matte painting department developed these amazing cykes, which is the ability to matte paint circularly around our CG set,” explained Manninen. “So we got not only the ability to move the camera around, but also get parallax as we moved across our world and action scenes, and so forth.”
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To create characters with fur and feathers interacting with flowing robes, DreamWorks ventured into simulated clothing. They created a new character effects department that focused on all the effects that were character driven. The character effects department worked closely with animation, and clothing was set up to be run by the animators. “When we did final character animation approvals, there was already a rough simulation pass on clothing, so the animators could actually see the clothing in their overnight motion renders. Not only did it allow animators to have a sense of what the clothing might do, but it also allowed us to sanity check ourselves on how much work it would be, because we had to be schedule minded as well.”
As a starting point they used technology that was developed for Puss ‘n Boots in Shrek 2. Automated, it now offers a procedural way to have fur interact with clothing, by using an automated pass before the characters entered lighting.
They also automated the fur and feather systems. Typically a feather system runs as a post process on the characters, but that technique tends to leave problem areas that require a lot of hand tweaking feathers, frame by frame. The Kung Fu Panda R&D developers focused their attention on creating an automated system that didn’t have those kind of problems. The result was the ability to run the feathers procedurally and the feathers took care of themselves, which is almost unheard of. They used this not only on the main characters, but on crowd characters as well.
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