We talk to Doug Sutton, one of the animators involved in the making of the recent hit movie Transformers.

Even if you’re not a fan of the original cartoon series, you most likely have been to watch the recent Michael Bay-directed Transformers movie and were blown away by just how realistic the Autobots and Decepticons looked.

Well, the reason for this is of course based entirely on the work of sequence supervisor and artist, Doug Sutton and his team of animators at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) who were responsible for bringing the two-dimensional cartoon robots into full 3D glory.

Sutton has been at ILM for about eleven years and the first movie he worked on was Steven Spielberg’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park.

In fact, until Transformers, Sutton confesses that his favourite movie in terms the work he’s done was The Lost World: Jurassic Park.

However, working on Transformers is a whole different ballgame, according to Sutton, "For years we worked on how to light skin and make it look realistic and less shiny, and now with Transformers, we were back to making shiny surfaces which reflected lots of light again."

Initial modeling

First off, the initial artwork and design of the robots are done by Bay’s own team of artists and then the work is passed on to ILM to refine it and then bring it to life.

The ILM team will then figure out the robots and then work out how to make them transform.

One of the early challenges was in figuring out how the robots should move.

“Early on, Michael Bay stated that he wanted the robots to move in a very nimble, fluid manner, not as lumbering giants,” observes Sutton.

There were extensive tests done also in trying to decide whether the robots would move more like animals or like humans.

Sutton then went on to illustrate this by showing off an early test in which the robots moved more like gorillas, but this was abandoned in favour of a more human-like movement.

In the end, the team at ILM settled upon Kung Fu movies utilising wire work fighting as a reference point for the animation in the Transformers.

In fact, if you look at the final product, there are many scenes which mimic many Kung Fu movie fight sequences.

The other issue was to make the robots themselves look realistic, with shiny surfaces that reflect the surroundings as well as reflecting the colours of the metallic automotive paint that the Autobots are supposedly painted with.

“The thing is that metallic paint today has a new kind of highlight which is a slightly different colour when viewed from different angles.

“All cars do that but it just depends on how much the change is from one car to another, and one of our biggest challenges was making this look right,” Sutton said.

Multiple layers

Each robot in fact, was made up of multiple layers of effects, from the base layer that mimics the base paint coat, then to a layer with the colour paint effects, then a layer which shows the reflection of the surroundings and then finally to the textures and battle damage effects.

Since the robots were so highly reflective, lighting them was a major challenge — the problem is that most of the robots have to reflect back light points and some of the background, so a high-resolution, high-dynamic range panoramic photo had to be taken of the set or the location in which each robot was supposed to appear to help the animators figure out the light points and to be used as a reflection which was then mapped on to the robot’s reflective surfaces.

Sutton also observes that these days, ILM prefers actors and physical effects shot on location instead of as separate elements on a green screen — not only does it make the director’s job easier, but it also reduces the post production headaches ILM has in matching the lighting and colour balance of the actors, the backgrounds and the effects shots if all were shot on location.

Autobots Transform

One of the unique challenges of the Transformers was of course, the transformation effects — it was ILM’s job to figure out how each robot changed from a car to a robot and then back again.

While it was possible to make the robots transform realistically with every piece falling into place as it transforms, Sutton says that doing this was extremely difficult and building a single model that transformed from one to the other would result in a car that didn’t look quite right or a robot that wasn’t properly proportioned.

Instead, the animators rendered two different models — one for the car, and the other a robot.

To make them transform from one to the other “requires a lot of smoke and mirrors,” according to Sutton.

“To do the transform, what we did was have the robot model scrunched up inside the car model. Then as the transformation begins, the panels of the car move out of the way to reveal the robot parts and so on,” he said.

The fact is that there is little continuity between the car model and the robot model — once the robot parts are revealed, the car parts sort of shrink and move out of the way, Sutton revealed.

Rendering

According to Sutton, once done, rendering the effects takes months to complete with machines utilising thousands of microprocessors running on a stripped down version of Linux.

Just to offer some perspective, rendering an effects shot in Transformers takes about five to six hours per frame, which, Sutton observes, is quite fast by industry standards, where some more complicated effects in other films could take up to 24 hours to render per frame.

As for the hardware that the animators themselves use to work on, they are basically off-the-shelf components running typical PC hardware — dual-core processors and other standard hardware.

ILM themselves use Autodesk’s Maya to do most of the animation, although they do have custom-built tools to achieve certain specialised effects.

Working with Michael Bay

“How is it to work with Michael Bay? Well, Mike is a jerk! But he’s a very talented jerk — he’s usually right in his choices,” says Sutton with a laugh.

“You have to understand Mike is a very energetic person, and if he doesn't like something, he'll say, “That is the most terrible thing I've ever seen! I hate that!” he added.

On the other hand, when Bay actually likes something, his praise is a lot more restrained — according to Sutton, the highest praise you can get from Michael Bay is, “Hmmm that's not bad.”

Having said that, though, Sutton observes that the one good thing about Bay is that he's very open to artists and if one has a good idea, he will be open to integrate that into the movie.

Sutton also adds that Bay likes to use lenses which have a lot of flare when there are points of light present in the scene and that was something which ILM had to work on to match in making the Transformers.

The animators were so often prompted by Bay to add “more flare” that they created a joke effects reel in which they took the highlights and lens flare effects to the extreme, with the robots having so many highlights that it was completely blinding to the viewer.