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n n n n CGI careful about what we broke,” Yuh-Nelson says. “During the battle with Tai Lung, we punched one building and a gate. It looked good, but that’s all we could do, and it was complicated making that one building col- lapse. Now we have more ability to destroy things convincingly. We don’t have to stop with one small building. So, we took advan- tage. But, not for bling. Everything is char- acter- and story-based; we aren’t just flapping around making noise.” The effects crew, however, took advantage of their expertise to slip a little bling to the ac- tion, anyway. “We’ve gotten good at blowing things up and knocking things down, but we wanted to push the effects,” Parkinson says. “Because [Lord Shen’s] family had been in the fireworks business, we decided to give every- thing a fireworks sparkle. A building might crumble realistically, but we added a firework effect to the destruction. Hopefully, it’s an original kind of look.” At top, when hue values decreased, lighters increased saturation to help avoid having the darks get “dirty.” At bottom, to enhance the film’s graphic design yet still keep the richness provided by global illumination, lighters nudged the colors of bounce light. the scenes would be too heavy to handle be- cause there were so many characters on screen.” The wolves don’t practice kung fu; after all, the peacock wants to eradicate kung fu. In- stead, they’re brawlers. “They’re feral,” Guen- doen says, “and they have a lot of weapons.” The climactic battle takes place over several sequences, which include crowd simulations for the wolves as well as hero animation. For the crowd simulations, DreamWorks turned to Massive software, which the studio had tested on Megamind (see “Mind over Matter,” November 2010). “We wanted to use it for our battle se- quences to get great performances out of the crowds,” Parkinson says. “It was important to have the good-guy characters among the army doing hand-to-hand fighting.” During the battle, the hero characters run and jump from boat to bobbling boat filled with the feral Massive-controlled wolves. The system for keeping the boats rocking with the currents and the wolves planted inside started with layout. “Layout installed the boats in a basic position,” Parkinson says. “We created the ambient motion of the water with a noise function, that is, a fluid simulation. The battle isn’t in the middle of a storm; we just had to 12 May 2011 keep the water alive.” The effects artists parented the wolves to the boats and moved the boats using the same noise function that moved the water. “So everything had a base movement to it,” Par- kinson says. “Then, we gave animators con- trol so if they had a hero character land on a boat, they could tip it or move it in some way. If they did, because we had parented the crowd characters to the boats, they’d stick to the mo- tion of the boat. But, we had to send the shots back to simulation to add ripples and splashes in the water.” For water simulations, the effects depart- ment uses proprietary software, Autodesk’s Maya, and Side Effects’ Houdini. “The choice depends on the skill set of the artist and the na- ture of the effect,” Parkinson says. “Houdini’s strong point turned out to be creating stylized motion in the water, and we used proprietary software for the interaction.” Similarly, the artists turned to all three solu- tions as appropriate for fire, explosions, and de- struction. As the story goes, Lord Shen perverted the family’s fireworks factory into a weapons- manufacturing plant, and the explosive result sparked several sequences in the film. “In the first [Panda] movie, we had to be Red Versus Blue The combination of fire and water meant the lighting crew faced the same problem that they had in the first film, the battle of red and blue, and not only during explosions, but also because the sequences take place on a moonlit night and each boat is lit by torches. Lighting supervisor Dave Walvoord explains. “We describe Kung Fu Panda 2 as an alternate universe,” he says. “It’s a place where animals talk and do kung fu. But, there are a certain physics in this world. It’s not present in our world, but it’s rigorous. There is a certain way light should behave, and that helps create the style of the movie.” To hold true to the alternate physics in the Panda world, the lighting team developed a set of rules, and one rule caused the battle be- tween red and blue. “We don’t allow lights to mix,” Walvoord says. In the first movie, the design of Tai Lung’s prison-escape sequence called for strong blues and reds, but the problem arose when red light and blue light mixed: The light became purple, and they could not have any purple in the sequence. “At first we tried using the lights like paint,” Walvoord explains. “Like when you paint red over blue in Photoshop so they don’t mix, but it looked horrible because the lights started behaving like paint. Light is so important for understanding space, and we were destroying space. We didn’t know who was going where.” Instead, to keep a strong red and a strong blue and nothing between, they placed lights so the two wouldn’t mix naturally, and insert-