Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1535742
By the time Kung Fu Panda 4 was produced, advanced lighting technology brought a new degree of realism, while at the same time giving artists more creative freedom. LIGHT IT UP In the trajectory of CG animated films, lighting played a crucial role. The introduction of Global Illumination revolutionized how lighting was handled, combining indirect and direct lighting to simulate real-world behavior more accurately. Ray tracing took it one step further, tracing the path of light to allow the simulation of highly realistic reflections, shadows, and color. DreamWorks' Visual Effects Supervisor Betsy Nofsinger witnessed massive growth in lighting technology between Kung Fu Panda (2008) and Kung Fu Panda 4 (2024). She says that in key areas, the pipeline for Kung Fu Panda 4 is basically unrecognizable from the one used in the first film. "The quality of the light on the first film had bounce (indirect) lighting made by the artists as baked maps," she explains. This was cached to be referenced in subsequent shading passes. "For environments," she adds, "we often shared maps for a whole sequence and even painted them to make some last fixes in the hundreds of maps and avoid a rerender. That meant it was difficult to customize environment lighting shot by shot." Kung Fu Panda 4, in contrast, was lit and rendered by the studio's production renderer: MoonRay, which was first used on How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019). From the first Kung Fu Panda, "we had 16 years worth of advancement into raytracing to achieve indirect lighting workflows that are more intuitive to the artist … and more sophisticated in the final result," Nofsinger says. "Many bounces of indirect influence are possible, and material shaders are able to respond to light either very physically or very non- photorealistically depending on the art direction. The richness and variety of what can be achieved is so advanced compared to the earlier workflows." SUMMER 2025 41