Moving on to Kung Fu

With no new news regarding the Stereo 3D, I am moving on to my next topic, setting up my next production in Mental Ray, the Kung Fu Panda TV Series. While The Penguins of Madagascar has been quite successful, it was started a couple of years ago and was developed in Maya 8. Now it is in Maya 2008, after a brief stab at 8.5, but that was a painful upgrade, and it doesn't look like it will upgrade anytime soon, why fix it if in ain't broken! The Penguins of Madagascar is rendered completely in Maya Software, with baked Ambient Occlusion in the set, when we started, it was too costly to render in Mental Ray with live AO at our vendor studios. The characters all have fake AO shadows from a depth map shadow casting ambient dome, which brings its own issues. For Kung Fu Panda, we switched to 2009, to take advantage of the new Mental Ray integration and the updated nParticles system.

With 2009, and upgrades at our vendor studios, it is now possible for us to render completely in Mental Ray so we have made the change. With the advances in the technology, it is also faster for us to ray trace our shadows and use final gather than to use a separate AO pass. Yes I know it is not the same, but we were facing many issues with the AO pass and quality, and the Final Gather is giving us a better look by itself than with AO added. We ran into a limitation of the shader, that causes faceting for a nice smooth AO. I will post some examples later, it is from the spread being set too high, which we needed to get the look we wanted.