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Kung Fu Panda: DreamWorks Animation artists pack a punch with HP

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Image from animated movie 'Kung Fu Panda.'

Overview

  1. »Technology meets talent
  2. »Behind the scenes
  3. »The colour remains the same
Image of HP computer

When it comes to bringing stories and characters to life, DreamWorks Animation earns a black belt.

In Kung Fu Panda, the talents of DreamWorks artists meet the traditions of martial arts while the technology behind the film delivers “the next big thing” — bringing to life some of the most stunning scenes ever created in an animated film.

“We’ve been working with HP for years to develop and implement technology that enhances our creativity,” said Jeffrey Katzenberg, chief executive officer and founder, DreamWorks Animation. “With the help of HP technology, our animators are now creating movies that were simply impossible to make even last year.”

Technology meets talent

In 2001, DreamWorks and HP formed an alliance to revolutionise the animation industry. HP has helped DreamWorks Animation create groundbreaking animation features from Shrek to Bee Movie. With every film, DreamWorks brings more visual complexity to the screen. More details are created under the same deadlines. All of which makes for great storytelling.

When DreamWorks decided to turn a 260-pound panda into a kung fu warrior, they didn’t look to a desktop. They brought their idea to life with high-performance HP Workstations. Audiences will see a wide variety of deeply intricate, organic environments that only exist because of the unprecedented power of HP workstations with multi-core processors. Artists worked interactively with graphics in near real-time to see what the actual film would look like. They could spin complex models around, revise their shape and form, and quickly make changes to improve the visual effect — without interrupting the creative work flow.

The freedom to use camera motion is particularly important in a kung fu movie, and HP technology allowed DreamWorks Animation to utilise the largest number of moving cameras on any of its films to date.

Behind the scenes

In the process known as ‘rendering,’ computers add fine detail to animated features like hair, skin, clothes and water. The process converts artists' workstation-generated models into finished images – complete with lighting, textures and special effects. HP technology renders images and gets them back to artists and directors overnight for quick review so that artistic decisions, instead of technical ones, lead the creative process.

The Kung Fu Panda ‘render farm,’ a bank of servers featuring HP’s BL465c blades, handled the intense computations. The film ultimately required more than 24 million computer or ‘render’ hours – four times as many as Shrek. With crowd scenes full of fur flying, feathers flapping, and cloth flowing, few other systems would have been able to keep up.

The colour remains the same

Yet another result of the unprecedented collaboration between the two companies is the HP DreamColour display.

Designed for professionals for whom accurate colour management is essential, the HP DreamColour display achieves more than 64 times the colours available on mainstream LCDs. Reds, blues and greens are visibly deeper, blacks are four times darker, and whites are adjustable. It generates the industry’s first combination of true 30-bit colour – enabling a range of 1 billion colours – in an LED-backlit LCD. This is the backlighting commonly used in small, inexpensive LCD panels that cost a fraction of studio-quality LCD displays.

Thanks to HP, it is now possible – for the first time – to have a colour-critical LCD display on every desk to make colour checks, redesigns and multiple proofs a thing of the past.

“For decades, storytellers have struggled to manage colour in an accurate and consistent manner,” said Jeffrey Katzenberg. “HP has truly changed the game with its new display, giving DreamWorks Animation full visual fidelity across the board for the first time.”