grrinc: grrinc: In defense of DT, they have never implied this is the technique used by ILM. They quite clearly state that this is the technique the tutor uses, that’s all. For anyone wishing to emulate the ILM technique, you’ll need to start by having about another 200 effects guys and shit loads of money. Until then, these DT training vids are fine.

I don’t have my notes with me, but I think for ILM’s Transformers the main bulk of the concept was done by Ben Procter (including diagrams and sequence drawings for the transformations).

You have to remember that ILM needed a quasi-generic solution because while they needed to formulate and test a transformable robot solution as early as 2004, the General Motors deals didn’t really get finalized until at least a year later… Which means that for a long period of time you don’t know which characters are which cars or planes…

This could be the reason why the transformations are very complex and look like “swathes of small moving parts” to cover any eventuality. This includes some things that constitute “cheating” like “parts of the robot that only seem like they came from the vehicle but actually are not part of the vehicle”.

But basically it was Ben and I think another artist… and then ILM formed teams around each character and transformation that Ben mapped out. Took them I think about 10 months per character to get working builds for all of them.

If you note the shooting schedule for Transformers was roughly April - September 2006… And then the Post Production was September 2006 onwards into 2007 for the July 4, 2007 release. Then it’s a tight schedule.

I’m not too sure… But basically the hard part of the job was Procter’s rationale of getting from Vehicle to Robot and Back.

Head and face design were huge issues too.

Darkherow: Darkherow: Interesting how you mention the rig folding but won’t this cause issues for the geometry?

Not if you chop up one arm into individual “blocks” of parts… and then assign a floating bone to each of them… and then assign all the bones to one “Arm bone” for example…

So when the parts “come to rest”… and you move that arm bone… it all looks like one arm.