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''Robot Wars:'' A Look At ILM's ''Transformers'' Adventure

3D World Magazine
Robot Wars

The September 2007 issue of UK Magazine 3D World features an article with insight into the George Lucas animation studio powerhouse Industrial Light and Magic (ILM). Their credits include many groundbreaking movies in the past decade including the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, the “Harry Potter” films, as well as “War of the Worlds.”

The following are notes from the article that are both impressive and give a nice look at the process of making our favorite robots come to life on the silver screen that has made “Transformers” one of the highest-grossing films in 2007.

Construction of the Robots
ILM created a total of 60,217 vehicle parts and over 12.5 million polygons for all of the 14 robots that were included in the movie. All in all, ILM created 450 shots for the film with Digital Domain supplying another 95, which included the Nokia robot, the Mountain Dew machine, Xbox 360, as well as flashbacks and desert sequences. Digital Domain was acquired by Michael Bay back in 2006.

Even though Barricade is one of the smaller-sized robots, he still possessed an impressive arsenal in terms of geometric pieces (3,236), polygons (644,528), and texture maps (200).

The most complex robot of them all is Optimus Prime with 10,108 pieces of geometry, and 1,830,898 polygons. Prime’s face alone has 200 moving parts with 30 facial controls. An animator has the chance to move any piece. If one were to lay all of the pieces in a straight line, it would total to 6,070 feet in length.

The most complex Decepticon is Blackout with 7,742 geometric pieces, and 1,426,781 polygons. This is in stark contrast to the most simplistic robot Frenzy, who has 871 geometric pieces and 233,178 polygons.

Two Megatrons were created for the movie. One is a 40-foot tall robot that served as the frozen version and the other one is the 35-foot tall moving version at 433,949 polygons, 2,411 pieces of geometry.

Animation
Bay wanted the robots to be large but to not have them hindered by their size when they were performing complex martial arts fights or movements.

In order to get reference of what fluid martial arts fighting is like, ILM video tapes real-life martial artists going through the choreographed fights.

However, one of the lead animators Paul Kavanagh said the reference footage helped, but did not completely solve all of their problems. In order to allow the audience to believe that the robots actually had some weight to them, frames were added to the reference footage to slow it down.

Once animation of the robots began, they stretched out the animation curve until it looked more plausible and with more weight. They found that the closer the robot was to the camera, the faster the movements they could get away with.

Another example to get fluid, and believable animations, the ILM animators filmed each other rollerblading in the parking garage. This reference footage was used as a base for Bonecrusher’s highway sequence.

Each shot was always pushed by Bay to get more and more action into the frame. The ILM animators did not seem to mind. Kavanagh says that he has a great eye and “I can’t think of any shots he didn’t turn up to 11 on the cool factor scale.”

Transformations
As amazing as it seems, all of the robots’ vehicle and robot modes were designed separately from each other and then integrated at a later time by another team led by Keiji Yamagushi.

Yamagushi was responsible for many of the transformation sequences. The fastest transformation was Megatron’s transformation into his cybertronian jet while the longest transformation was the first time Blackout’s transformation was shown on-screen. That took 300 frames to complete.

He was responsible for moving pieces of the robot and figure out where he could put them when they transform from the complex robot to a less-complex vehicle mode.

To do so, the studio created a dynamic rig to allow the selection of “any piece of hi-res geometry of any group of pieces, create an animation controller, and choose where to put the pivots,” said another Lead Animator Shawn Kelly.

Facial Features
There was an uproar from the fan community when it was revealed that Optimus Prime would have a face with lips. However, it was very important to Bay that he have lips. He felt that showing Prime’s face was necessary in order for him to connect with the human characters in the movie as well as the audience watching.

It was also a large touch that Bay decided that the robots have eyes that show a lot of emotion. The most up-close robot for the movie was Bumblebee, and to create his facial expressions, the ILM animators used Michael J. Fox’s work in Back to the Future as reference. Bay has said that Fox’s character is the closest personality to what Bumblebee’s character is modeled after.

Pushing the Envelope
Even if “Transformers” does not get ILM noticed like they did for their work on “Dead Man’s Chest,” they felt they set the bar very high for themselves and unprecedented. “We’ve never done a hard-body show at this level before,” associate visual effects supervisor Russell Earl says. Hard-bodies are generally thought to be easier to work with than a character such as Davy Jones.

But in this movie, they had many things to consider including lighting shots with thousands of reflecting surfaces, and managing the level of detail sufficiently to make rendering the shots feasible.

ILM’s hard work over the year it took to develop the special effects obviously paid off in the end. Hopefully the studio’s accomplishments in this movie will push other visual effects-oriented films to attempt to outdo this movie.

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