TRAVELLING TO CYBERTRON
ILM’S VFX SUPERVISOR JASON SMITH AND ASSOCIATE VFX SUPERVISOR DAVID FOGLER ON BUILDING THE TRANSFORMERS’ HOME WORLD
Not only does the Earth make an appearance on the big screen, but also the planetary home of the Transformers known as Cybertron.
“Cybertron is in many shots and was dauntingly complex,” states ILM associate VFX supervisor David Fogler, who oversaw the development of the world building. “Cybertron as a basic concept was a challenge. What it should look like? How should it behave? We spent a year and a half figuring out what it should look like and that’s not an exaggeration.” Numerous concept designs were developed by production designer Jeffrey Beecroft and ILM art director Ryan Church. “Michael Bay chose a few of those concepts that were his favourites,” explains ILM visual effects supervisor Jason Smith. “Once we had those key pieces of art, David Fogler, Scott Farrar and I boiled them down to key elements that were built into the model that we could then vary, duplicate and reuse. At the end of the day, that model is of a planet broken up into chunks and each chunk is hundreds of thousands of parts. It’s more complicated in terms of the number of parts and geometry than most of the robots.”
“Just coming up with a way to handle that complexity was a huge challenge for our pipeline,” says Jason. “Then there was dealing with it crashing into the moon. The simulation team here is used to dealing with buildings being crushed or fire or smoke. But when something of that scale crashes into the moon causing destruction, you having to handle all of those elements in one shot because parts of the Moon will liquify, break as solid rock, and become dust. Those shots were a large challenge for the simulation team because of the heaviness of the model, the complexity of what those shapes are, and then all those simulations have to work together.”