Transformers Rise of the Beasts
Feature film • Paramount • 2023
I’ve loved Transformers for as long as I can remember. The first film from 2007 was the film that made me interested in VFX. The work that ILM had done on that film was mind blowing to me as a kid and is still, even as an adult.
It was a true honour to be able to play a big part in realising the vision for this film. I was the Lead Texture and LookDev Technical Director for this film on the London side where I worked on the film for nearly 2 years, developing the workflow for texturing and shading the characters and assets across the entire film.
I contributed to 9 different characters across 15 different assets over the 2 years that I was on the show.
During my time on the show I contributed to; Bumblebee, Mirage, Optimus Prime, Optimus Primal, Stratosphere, Battletrap, Air Razor, and Transit, who was ultimately cut from the film. My biggest artistic contribution to the film was Bumblebee, who I did all of the Modeling, Texturing, and LookDev for. Optimus Prime and Bumblebee have been favorite characters of mine since childhood so having the opportunity to bring them to life for countless other fans was a great honor.
Since I was Lead on the project I oversaw the Texturing and Look Development of all assets on the London side in collaboration with the Asset Supervisors and other Leads. Each character had it’s own vehicle counterpart as well as props such as swords, blasters, maces etc. Each character also had various damage stages, some with far more than the rest. There were also props used in the throughout the film that had to have digi doubles made.
We had a lot of assets to build in a very short amount of time. I developed a workflow for our characters that allowed us to speed up how quickly we got them to 85% quality by 138.2%. The bulk of the work was handled by procedural setups created in Mari and Substance and then fed into modular Katana RenderMan shading setups for easy tweaking.
Our assets were extremely heavy with lots of objects and UDIMs. We had to come up with clever ways to work with them inside of our pipeline to create their main and also their damage variants in record time. Some assets were sent to WetaFX as they did the beginning and end sequences of the film.
One of my Bumblebee Damage Variant Turntables from MPC. Bumblebee had a total of 4 in the film.