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MillimeterStep by Step: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Jul 1, 2009 12:28 PM, By Ellen Wolff
Ever since the success of Transformers for Paramount Pictures and director Michael Bay in 2007, expectations for the sequel have been high. With Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Bay has some nasty new bad guys to reveal. In one shot, tens of thousands of plague-infected ball bearings are unleashed through a ventilation system. Each one of them hatches into a tiny insect-like robot called a Microcon, and this group then assembles—en masse—into a fearsome robot that’s completely new. Creating this complex series of transformations was the assignment given to Digital Domain (DD) in Venice, Calif.
“It’s fully synthetic. There was no background plate,” says DD Visual Effects Supervisor Matthew Butler. But because this shot had to hook up with a steadicam shot from a real set, Butler’s team surveyed that set and took digital photographs and high dynamic range images of the lighting. Armed with that material and a previz from Bay, DD set about creating a CG environment that blended seamlessly.
“Our 3D background was created in Nuke,” says DD CG Supervisor Paul Palop (referring to the software developed at Digital Domain and now sold by The Foundry). Because thousands of ball bearings were so close to the floor in this shot, Palop’s team had to pay additional attention to the way the 3D CG floor was constructed and rendered. For that, DD used Autodesk Maya and Pixar RenderMan.
Although the shot is synthetic, Bay provided real-world references of how ball bearings should move. “Mike Bay loves the practical photographic world,” Butler says. “Since these ball bearings are supposed to fall down through air vents, Mike photographed hundreds of practical ball bearings falling and rolling around. The shot calls for these Microcons to have some self-awareness, so Mike got under a table holding large magnets and made the ball bearings move around in a staccato manner. That set the tone for our CG ball bearings. We had the advantage of knowing what they do in reality—and the disadvantages of having to replicate that.”
“I think we did 30,000 CG ball bearings,” Palop say. “We had to develop a crowd system in [Side Effects Software] Houdini to be able to control their behaviors. Houdini can assign a charge to a particle and you can set up rules that define how that charge changes over time depending on what’s happening around it. We could define, based on the reference from Michael’s photography, what these guys needed to do to make it to seem like they had some level of intellect. The approach we took was to simulate particles, give them a behavior, and stamp prebaked animation cycles from our library onto those particles. Our system chooses—depending on the action required—which animation cycles we would stamp on the particles.”
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