CGSociety

CGSociety :: Special Feature
26 June 2009, by Dane Maddams

In the span of just weeks, Plastic Wax Animation completed 16 shots with a total of one minute 11 seconds of animation for the new 'Transformers - Revenge Of The Fallen' game cinematic for PS3 and Xbox360.

"We had two weeks to work with our good friends at Activision and Luxoflux to garner their ideas and vision, creating storyboards and ultimately bringing their concept to life.

We provided them with numerous animated storyboards until we all were in agreement with cameras, timing and overall composition.

One of the core components for this piece was the frenetic feel of the camera, throwing you into the heart of an intense battle amid the city."

There were 11 Transformers in the cinematic, nine of which were generously supplied to us by Industrial light and Magic. The ILM models were in Maya format, with no shaders or rigs and as they were film quality assets they were extremely high in geometry detail.

Considering they were made for a very specific pipeline, we reduced geometry that was not visible in scene and re-worked the textures to show more appropriate scene specific damage and wear.

Optimus Prime originally came in with around 10,000 objects in Maya which we then brought into 3ds Max and reduced by eye to just under a third of the original object count. Similarly Starscream came in at around 5000 objects to which we halved.

Two of these Transformers, the Combaticons - Scout and Warrior (supplied by Luxoflux), required full UVs, textures and shaders from scratch.

Considering the strangely exciting yet arduous task of making a believable Optimus Prime transformation within the tight deadline, we worked closely with the plethora of reference materials from the movie and brainstormed what would be the most appropriate, while keeping the fast-paced flow. Even though time was an issue, the rigs had to contain many animation controls so that the animators could refine all motion right up to the very last minute.

We built up a library of character rigs which had been developed with very specific functionality in mind. These could then be used for certain shots which had individual motion requirements for each character.

A major consideration for the animation was the camera itself. One of the critical points in the creative brief was to develop a hand-held feel to make the viewer feel like they've been thrown in amongst the action.

We wanted them to feel the heat of each explosion and also capturing the sense of overwhelming scale from these characters.

The cameras evolved throughout the animation pipeline.

In the intense battle scenes we considered the cameras to be an extra character caught between all of the chaos, which deemed integral to the choreography and flow of the action.

We worked on additional battle damage to each Transformer: burns; armor chips; explosion impacts as well as environmental/vehicle damage on the city streets. Due to the sheer amount of geometry contained within the Transformers, it was important to reduce the overall amount of texture maps.

This was achieved by creating additional textures with enhanced armour wear and for specific close up shots, we needed a further level of control. A good example of this is Warrior, the first texture pass was a base color followed by the UVing and texturing in CS3 of 12 upper body panels that are seen quite close to camera.

For the city streets, the client provided movie reference of downtown Shanghai. We focused on a very similar and specific area of Sydney, where we gained most of our reference materials.
This was an advantage as we were able to take high-resolution photos of buildings locally.

The glaringly obvious difference was the large number of neon signs. We had to litter the streets with these glowing, flickering adverts to give an authentic feel. Each sign needed an accurate translation into both English and Chinese.

The 11 Transformers, human soldiers, vehicles and Shanghai CG environment were all shaded and rendered using V-Ray in 3ds Max. Creating the shaders for the iconic Transformers proved to be a huge task considering the movie is the benchmark.

To give the compositors maximum control, each character was rendered with a number of layers. These layers included lighting, global illumination, reflection, refraction, diffuse and specular passes.

The opening shot for Transformers, just like in the movie, shows the pods shooting toward earth. We used Fume FX for all flames emanating from the asteroids and Particle Flow for the sparks along with debris and finally Afterburn for the smoke trails.

For the shot where Megatron is sinking into the ocean the underwater feel was accomplished using Dreamscape software. Particle Flow was used to create the bubbles with a mixture of animated spheres rotating on an offset pivot point. These particles would spawn out of themselves create the illusion they are dividing underwater into smaller bubbles.

During the intense battle scene, all smoke and fire effects were created in Fume and the soldier's machine gun muzzle flashes were a combination of live footage and CG. Afterburn was used for the Decepticon missile trails and for smoke we used proxy collision objects to interact with Fume. Various pieces of flying debris were created with Particle Flow and the interactive lighting passes were added to every fire, explosion and light source in the scene.

The entire cinematic was composited using Apple Shake. All character and set passes were rendered as 32-bit EXRs. This was especially necessary as we were receiving all of our interactive light passes (for explosions, muzzle flashes etc) as black and white masks. We were then using those masks to affect the original set and character passes that made an added bit depth necessary. Some of the shots had over 70 individual passes, and when a great deal of those are 32-bit floating point as you can imagine it made for some quite heavy and complicated comps. A great deal of atmospheric light was added, consisting of radial color gradients, placed just off screen to simulate light spilling into the shot from the surroundings
The transition from battle scene to the globe and the war room was difficult because there was so much happening in such a short amount of time. We transitioned firstly through the blue flames of Optimus Prime's main weapon impacts, then to a realistic looking Earth, finally to a holographic Earth, keeping it all flowing and believable. Finally a post comp grade was added to all the battle sequences. We added more blues and greens to the city streets to match the unique colour palette of the feature film. Depth of field was used on the majority of the battle sequence shots, also added in comp. TRANSFORMERS and all related characters are trademarks of Hasbro and are used with permission. (c) 2009 Hasbro, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Plastic Wax is a leading digital design, 3D art, animation and production studio specializing in the creation of premium digital entertainment, 3D art and animation for the global entertainment and gaming industries.