The concept artists in our Design team were briefed to create the Maximal’s home planet, balancing lush, Earth-like qualities with Maximal technology in the entirely CG environment.
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Feature Fil VFX
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
Wētā FX
The concept artists in our Design team were briefed to create the Maximal’s home planet, balancing lush, Earth-like qualities with Maximal technology in the entirely CG environment.
As planet-munching robot Unicron devours the planet in a feast of world-ending FX, we faced several challenges, both technical and artistic. Due to the lack of atmospheric haze in space to support Unicron’s scale, we developed alternative approaches to establish his size. This included careful camera placement, framing Unicron against the Maximal's home planet, as well as adding micro-textures implying city lights seen from space.
Unicron’s size had to always be carefully considered, so for the end of the climactic volcano fight, his scale was cheated down to assist with the storytelling, an essential technique to portray the creature’s maw. Similarly, when Unicron interacts with the environment, certain FX simulations were scaled down to achieve a dramatic read.
Our animators choreographed, rehearsed, and captured the third act on our mocap stage to ensure the motion felt believable, while keeping it to scale in the vast environment with hundreds of interacting assets. As work started on the Transformer character puppets, animators also had to understand the mechanical principles of a rigid machine in motion.
Paradoxically, after working out the mechanics, we applied proprietary human facial animation techniques to the mechanical visage, supporting the dialog and robot interactions.
A new toolset was developed to allow the hugely complex transformations to be 100% bakeable. As Mirage morphs into an exosuit for Noah, we reveal the constituent parts hidden inside the Mirage model all along, in order to seamlessly manifest, grow, extrude, slide, rotate, and lock into place at the time of transformation.
With the majority of shots being fully CG, the minimal plate photography was limited to a few environmental features and human characters close to camera. This gave artists greater creative control of the final look.
CREW
Wētā FX