ANIMATION
Dan Wagner was Head of Character Animation. He first started in 2D animation at the age of 8, and switched to 3D on Shrek 2. He started on Kung Fu Panda before the characters had any rigs, so, falling back on his many years as a traditional animator, worked on test animations for main character Po in pencil and paper.
The film was in animation for a year and a half. Throughout, Wagner’s mantra was “ambient motion”, the importance of keeping the characters alive through subtle queues, be it breathing, or a lifted hand that was fighting against gravity no matter how strong the pose. “If you freeze something in CG, it just looks totally dead. Some shows require that; stylistically you want to go pose to pose and make it snappy, like in Madagascar."
Dan Wagner was Head of Character Animation. He first started in 2D animation at the age of 8, and switched to 3D on Shrek 2. He started on Kung Fu Panda before the characters had any rigs, so, falling back on his many years as a traditional animator, worked on test animations for main character Po in pencil and paper.
The film was in animation for a year and a half. Throughout, Wagner’s mantra was “ambient motion”, the importance of keeping the characters alive through subtle queues, be it breathing, or a lifted hand that was fighting against gravity no matter how strong the pose. “If you freeze something in CG, it just looks totally dead. Some shows require that; stylistically you want to go pose to pose and make it snappy, like in Madagascar."
We wanted to make Kung Fu Panda feel more natural, the characters to feel more real. If you look closely, you’ll be see, even when the characters are standing still, there is something moving, giving that extra bit of life. I wanted to make it look like the characters were thinking. It could be a small thing like their eyes darting back and forth, hitting certain poses well before the character starts saying something. It’s just trying to give the characters thought before one says the line.”
VIPER RIG
Of course, such a diverse cast of characters needed different personalities and rigs. The Viper character was, not surprisingly, the most difficult character. Snakes are deceptively difficult, as mentioned by animators on Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and 10,000 BC. It was no different for Viper, which required two rigs and was animated on a path that was also animated. The path had points for manipulation so the movement would appear more organic.
The result looked like the snake was being pulled along a train track. On top of that path was the Viper rig. Not only could they animate the snake on the path, they could separate the snake from the path and animate separate behaviors. It was a very complex and powerful rig with a massive learning curve. Wagner worked on the rig initially before passing it to Fred Nilsson, who improved it and offered tips and tricks to the team, becoming the specialist and go-to guy for that character.
Wagner and his team had their work cut out for them. “Just posing Viper took a long time to do. We had 13 points on her, and could lock any of those points to global space, but sometimes we had to have it locked in global space but still moving on the path. There were a lot of hoops we had to jump through to get certain movements correct. If it was a close-up of the Viper, just the headshot, then we could strictly use FK, but it was a very heavy rig.”
Though the characters had human traits, they wanted all to emulate the actual animal itself. Tigress was not only bipedal, but was designed to run on all fours, using the same rig. The same applied to Monkey.
The result looked like the snake was being pulled along a train track. On top of that path was the Viper rig. Not only could they animate the snake on the path, they could separate the snake from the path and animate separate behaviors. It was a very complex and powerful rig with a massive learning curve. Wagner worked on the rig initially before passing it to Fred Nilsson, who improved it and offered tips and tricks to the team, becoming the specialist and go-to guy for that character.
Wagner and his team had their work cut out for them. “Just posing Viper took a long time to do. We had 13 points on her, and could lock any of those points to global space, but sometimes we had to have it locked in global space but still moving on the path. There were a lot of hoops we had to jump through to get certain movements correct. If it was a close-up of the Viper, just the headshot, then we could strictly use FK, but it was a very heavy rig.”
Though the characters had human traits, they wanted all to emulate the actual animal itself. Tigress was not only bipedal, but was designed to run on all fours, using the same rig. The same applied to Monkey.
They also utilized squash and stretch using the DreamWorks proprietary system, Emotion, or Emo for short, one that has been around since the mid 80’s when it was just a flying logos program. DreamWorks improved on the software for Antz and Shrek. It’s a muscle based system on the whole body, designed to make everything move realistically. Another muscle based system called an ENet was used on the face, so if a character was to move a cheek, all of the points on the face are all connected, it would move the points surrounding it in varying degrees.
Wagner’s team also added a feature on the panda’s large belly to keep the arms and legs from colliding into the mass. The belly acted like a gas filled bag, so if an arm pushed into the body, the belly would shift away. “There was no way we could animate this character without having his arms and his legs pushing his fat out of the way. We could inflate or deflate the bag. In some poses he looked a little too fat so we had to deflate him, like if he was sitting on his butt we had to deflate him a little because he just looked like a ball.”
Wagner not only brought in martial arts experts to train the animators, he had a few animators on his team that had studied it for years. Animator Michael Kiely would give demonstrations on certain moves and stances and the logic behind each. Supervising Animator Rodolphe Guenoden, who also did storyboard work and acted as fight choreographer, had studied for most of his life.
Every week he would show films like Crouching Tiger or Fists of Fury, often freezing on a frame so the animators could rough out the pose in pencil, continuing every few frames to get a feel for where the character had put their weight and where limbs were extending. He would sketch poses and upload that information so the animators could see the arcs on their monitors, frame by frame. It was an animatic, not full animation, but a framework of how he wanted the characters to fight.
The animation team also attended several in-house seminars by Wushishu expert and performer Eric Chen, who offered details on how to hold a staff, step through certain moves, and where to put the weight on a characters foot when they were trying to flip an opponent.
In addition, what became known as the Furious Five: Monkey, Tigress, Viper, Crane, and Mantis, were named after the original fighting styles that still exist today. The decision was not to emulate human beings. For example, if a human was emulating a crane, they would put both the hands in a shape mimicking a beak, but instead, the desire was to maintain the animal characteristics in those moves.
Instead of Crane using his wings to create the beak shape, he would actually use his beak. And to maintain solid communication throughout the crew, the animation team worked closely with the layout crew and camera people to give them an idea of what was planned and making these characters fight.
THE BRIDGE BATTLE
One pinnacle of the film was when Tai Lung fights the Furious Five on a decaying rope bridge, a scene that involved character animation, effects animation, with everything intertwined, and it looked impossible to do. They had to find a way of procedurally breaking geometry and be able to describe fighting action with peril, so they used a procedural break technique that was also art directable, called “procedural fracturing.”
Manninen explains. “Lawrence Lee developed a method where we had an unfractured original model we could paint on top of, designing the break pattern for the pieces. Then we created cutting volumes by creating a voxel grid around the unfractured model, then it voxelized based on the painted colors on the surface.
Based on cellular automated techniques you grow the regions until all the voxels are filled in. Then you convert that to polygon meshes using a marching cube algorithm. Then you can use the unfractured model to convert the texture coordinates to have texture continuity through the breaking. You then use those polygonal meshes as a constructive solid geometric algorithm to create the final debris pieces.”
Basically, what that allowed the animators to do was paint on the models where the breaking pieces were constructed. The system makes it appear as if procedure breaks the geometry yet keeps the textural info intact so the textures didn’t pop. Procedural parenting kept the characters on the bridge after the dynamics were applied. This topic, along with several others on the film, will be covered at this years’ Siggraph.
ONE FOR LIFE
By staying away from pop culture and modern day references, DreamWorks hopes this film will be timeless, and 50 years from now would still be relevant. And in 50 years, it might still be the favorite of some DreamWorks artists. “I had a hard time leaving it,” said Wagner. “Really. Most of the animators felt that way too. They didn’t feel worn out, they really believed and enjoyed working on this film.
It wasn’t too much OT, we worked Saturdays for the last few months, but other than that it was a well run film. We did a lot of preplanning and everything worked out. We did our fight sequences in the middle of production, we didn’t wait and leave them till the end of production so that really helped us out. We did the hard stuff half way through. So all the acting etc was all down hill and easier to manage. Nobody was tired.
We’ve had some productions that were stressful, but this one ran very smoothly and DreamWorks is this production as a template on how they would like future productions to run. We lucked out, and there really was a sense of harmony on the animation. Even the production people. we all seemed like we were on the same page, believing in the film. That doesn’t happen very often. I tell animators, you will be working on dumpers for most of your career, but every once in a while you get a gem. Kung Fu Panda was a gem.”
We’ve had some productions that were stressful, but this one ran very smoothly and DreamWorks is this production as a template on how they would like future productions to run. We lucked out, and there really was a sense of harmony on the animation. Even the production people. we all seemed like we were on the same page, believing in the film. That doesn’t happen very often. I tell animators, you will be working on dumpers for most of your career, but every once in a while you get a gem. Kung Fu Panda was a gem.”
Kung fu panda is hands down my favorite film of all time. As an aspiring artist and film maker, this film shaped how I viewed animated films as a child. My father always reminds me of when I was 5 years old on a 16 hour road trip, re-watching this movie over, and over, and over. and digging through all of the special features, watching cut scenes and storyboards, playing all the shitty mini games, and watching how the actors blended into their roles for those entire 16 hours. This film is how I learned what happened behind the scenes, and how animated movies were made. This franchise still inspires me to this day, and as a 15 year old art student I can never thank it and the team enough for shaping the brilliant ball of clay it said I was.
ReplyDeleteThank you Kung-Fu panda team.
Sincerely,
Carley.