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MillimeterStep by Step: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Jul 1, 2009 12:28 PM, By Ellen Wolff
The metamorphoses that each ball bearing undergoes as it changes from a sphere into an insect-like creature was a challenge. “It was the least mechanical transformation that we dealt with,” Palop says. “It was more of a complex organic thing. We needed to imply the unfolding shape transforming and locking into place. We did shortcuts wherever possible. Once we freed ourselves from the physics of what should happen and we started doing what needed to happen, it became an easier problem. There was no volume conservation. It was a hand animation process, and once we had an iteration that was approved, we archived the geometry and the animation data and cloned it all over the place. We did variations so it didn’t look too CG. We had a couple of main transformation cycles—for in-place guys and guys who transformed on-the-go. It was important to convey the theory that the guys were swarming and assembling.”
Depth-of-field was a huge issue, given that about 15 ‘hero’ Microcons were close to camera and seen at high resolution, while the rest needed to appear believably busy in the background. “The distinction between the foreground and background characters is pretty gray,” Butler says. “The foreground guys were hand-animated [in Maya] and placed to camera. At the same time, we had another team that was taking the animation archived on disk and applying it procedurally to the particle system setup. We couldn’t have a hard delineation between foreground and background. There had to be enough variation put in there to give the illusion that they were gravitating in a direction.”
Lighting was also a multileveled task. “We had to approach it from two different angles,” Palop says. “For the hero guys in front, we have a pipeline based in Maya and RenderMan. The background guys were rendered through [Side Effects] Mantra. We had the same artists lighting both. We had to render them with the hero guys for holdout purposes because they do overlap in the middle ground, where hero guys intermingle with little guys from the particle system.”
The HDR information that DD had collected on set was valuable. “Metallic surfaces are tricky to light because of the small diffuse component they have,” Palop says. “All the reflections that we’re seeing on these little guys have the dynamic range of true reflections because we had good HDR data. On top of that, we did a layer of CG lighting with RenderMan and Mantra.”
“We generated many layers of lighting for the compositor,” Palop says. “We didn’t render depth-of-field because it’s a lot slower process, so we pushed the difficult computations of depth-of-field to the end. Everything was rendered sharp and then treated in Nuke for the final image.”
The end result, Butler says, “Looks primal, because we are inherently creeped-out by little critters. But they still needed to look cool. What Michael Bay kept saying was: ‘Just make it look cool.’”
Credit Roll
Director: Michael Bay
Previz: Proof
For Digital Domain:
Visual Effects Supervisor: Matthew Butler
CG Supervisor: Paul George Palop
Animation Supervisor: Dan Taylor
Compositing Supervisor: Lou Pecora
Character Set-up Lead: Richard Grandy
Character Animation Lead: Erik Gamache
Character Animator: Tim Ranck
CG Effects Animation Lead: Phillip Prahl
CG Effects Animator: Edmond Smith III
CG Modeling Lead: Melanie Okamura
CG Texture Lead: Cathy Morin
CG Lighting Lead: Charles Abou Aad
3D Integration Lead: David Niednagel
Technical Developer: Shoichi Matsubara
Compositor: R. Matt Smith
Continue the discussion on Crosstalk the Millimeter Forum.