Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/38279
■ ■ ■ ■ Animation “Th at’s the benefi t of having GPUs,” Sum- ner says. “What would have taken a day be- fore, takes an hour or less now. Big Shots The Autobots Bumblebee (at top), Optimus Prime (bottom), and other legacy robots visited the body shop before making their third screen appearance, to make sure all their internal parts were primed and painted for the stereo cameras, which can see deep inside the complex robots. diff erent colored materials on a robot posi- tioned on a turntable. “We have a standard setting in which the lighting never changes that we use to review all the assets,” Barnhill explains. “Th at’s something we lock down at the beginning to be sure we get a consistent look for all the characters.” Like most of the robots, the crew created Sentinel Prime using many types of materials. “We have brass, painted metal, body pan- els with color, tinted glass,” Barnhill says. “We even used chip maps that reveal an underly- ing primer beneath a painted surface, and displacement or bump maps that show the depth.” As battles progress and the robots be- come wounded, the materials change. But, the artists had even locked down these materials early in look development with the robot on the turntable. “I remember the old days when every shot was turmoil when we made material changes,” Barnhill says. “Now that we have the standard- ized environment, the robot looks good from the beginning when we drop it into a shot. Even though we might have diff erent lighting 12 June/July 2011 in the sequence than we did for the turntable, we rarely touched the asset. We could control the look with the lighting.” In fact, for CG sequences, such as those tak- ing place on the planet Cybertron, Barnhill’s team started with the standardized environ- ment, substituting that for the HDRI spheres. Th en as digimatte artists created Cybertron, a huge planet with interlocking latticework structures and harsh lighting, the lighting team used those images to create a more ac- curate HDRI-like environment sphere. In addition to more fi ghting, better light- ing, more dialog, and new body work, the team added pyro gags and hydraulics to amp up the action in 3D. “We have lots of hydraulic liquids spewing,” Farrar says, “brown, green, blue, red liquids. Starscream spits like crazy, and at one point, it even sticks to the lens. We have rocket trails, all that typical stuff that shoots toward the lens or past it to get those 3D moments.” All told, the crew ran more than 12,800 simulations inside the studio’s proprietary Plume software during the course of postproduction. All that, plus the complex robots, the digital environments, and the ensuing mayhem cre- ated hugely complex scenes. “We measured the scene in which the skyscraper tilts over, and it had 100,000 pieces of geometry in it,” Sumner says. “Th ankfully, our hardware ca- pabilities have increased since the last movie, but only the artists with 12-core, 48gb ma- chines could open it. And, once they had it open, the interactive speeds were very slow. Th ey couldn’t open the scene and render it on one machine.” Th e creature that wraps around the sky- scraper is larger than the Devastator, which was the biggest robot on the previous fi lm. “We created Devastator from six other robots,” Sumner explains. “He had 52,000 pieces of geometry; 11.7 million for rendering. Colos- sus has 86,000 pieces of geometry and 30 mil- lion polygons. He’s like 2.5 Devastators. Th ere were times when we had to lock off parts of the renderfarm to be sure these shots could get fi nished in time.” Farrar and Benza received Oscar nomina- tions for the fi rst Transformers, and it’s pos- sible the well-honed eff ects in the third fi lm will send them to red carpet land again. “I’d have to say our crew did incredible work,” Far- rar says. “So did Digital Domain. Th eir shots look fabulous. Everyone as practitioners of ef- fects and as craftspeople did exquisite work. I think the- atergoers will enjoy it.” ■ Barbara Robertson is an award- winning writer and a contributing editor for . She can be reached at BarbaraRR@comcast.net. ROBOTS Optimus Prime – 8000 pieces of geometry Devastator (Transformers: Re- venge of the Fallen) – 52,000 pieces of geometry Colossus (Transformers: Dark of the Moon) – 86,000 pieces of geometry Use your smart- phone to access related video. Computer Graphics W orld