Computer Graphics World

July 2009 22 n n n n CG Characters Big 'Bot Love Fourteen of ILM's robots from the first film returned and received what model and viewpaint supervisor Dave Fogler calls "a round of love." "e art department upped the complexity on the new robots," he says. "When you're dealing with organic crea- tures, to fool the eye into believing some- thing is real, you add wrinkles and hair. With robots, the formula we've come up with is that when you add enough detail to confuse your brain, it believes something is real. So, most of the former robots dropped right in, but they all needed some cleanup and improvement." e modelers provide complexity with individual mechanical parts, which they combine until they they've created the robot's shape. "You take for granted how the robots look now, but in the beginning, they could have transformed into some- thing with car panels and a closed look," Fogler says. "After going round in circles for a while, Michael Bay said we needed car parts, not alien insides—things that belong in car engines. at ties the robots to our world and gives them a sense of scale." At ILM, modelers sculpt in Autodesk's Maya. Painters create texture maps in Adobe's Photoshop, and use the studio's pro- prietary Viewpaint software to apply the tex- ture maps to the models. To make it easier for the modelers faced with building more than 30 new, unique robots with thousands of mechanical parts in each, Fogler leaned on his "kit-bashing" background in a tradi- tional model shop. In the physical model shop, crews often build new miniatures by using parts from an existing model kit. To move that idea into the virtual world, Fogler's digital model shop created a library of parts that modelers, in effect, copied and pasted into their robots. "Once a part was modeled and the look developed with textures and material assign- ments, we would drop it into a database so that it was available to everyone," Fogler says. Modelers building the robots could use any of these parts repeatedly, and they did. Fogler estimates that approximately 15 percent of the parts in all the robots originated in the parts library. Each part had a marker and ID; at render time, the system automatically looked for the assigned materials and textures for pieces checked out from the library. Devastator is procedure was especially important for the Devastator. e massive machine reach- es 100 feet when it stands, although more often, it moves on all fours like a gorilla. At five times the size of Optimus Prime, it has 52,632 parts made from nearly 12 mil- lion polygons. "If we took all the parts and stacked them lengthwise, it would be as tall as 58 Empire State Buildings," says Jason Smith, digital production supervisor. Smith has another comparison to share: "An average car has 5000 parts. Devastator has ten times that." And, another. "If you used all the gold mined in the entire earth, in the entire his- tory of man, it would fill only half of Dev- astator," Smith says. "I know that's a bizarre stat, and you might think, 'well, it's in the computer, it doesn't matter.' But with that Jetfire (top), an old robot that walks with a cane, and Wheelbot (bottom), a non-bipedal 'bot, join more than 30 new and 14 returning heavy-metal characters created at ILM. Devastator Number of geometric pieces: 52,632 Total number of polygons: 11,716,127 Total length of all pieces: 73,090 feet or 13.84 miles Gigabytes of textures: 32 Total textures: 6467 Devastator is as tall as a 10-story building. Laid out end to end, Devasta- tor's parts would be almost 14 miles long. When Devastator punches the pyramid, its hand is traveling at 390 miles per hour.

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