ALICE
Sam, played by Shia LaBeouf, has gone off to college and is meeting new people, making new friends. The Decepticons are trying to get information from Sam. Enter Alice, the hot chick college student, who is really a Decepticon. While Sam is trying to remain loyal to Mikaela, Alice is trying to seduce him to gain information.

Alice, played by Isabel Lucas, was scanned at Gentle Giant Studios, and her dress was a cloth simulation in Maya. The digital model was then rotoscoped to fit the actresses’ movements exactly during the 70-some frames over which the transformation took place. A photography plate was all they had for texture and lighting information.

According to Paul George Palop, CG Supervisor, “the first limitation we found was we had no lighting information. The tiles were only taking the projection of the plate, basically baked in lighting. We were projecting the plate onto the geometry and then turning the geometry into tiles, and they would rotate out of the way.” That was sufficient for the first few frames but as soon as the tiles rotate, the effect broke because the lighting was not dynamic to the environment. Using HDR photography, DD built an entire set of the room and used that to derive lighting information. To add the extra punch, they raytraced the tiles with occlusion and reflections, causing some very expensive but necessary renders. “We lost count of the passes generated for the compositors, but it was probably around 50.” This provided the compositor with a number of passes to dial in.

Next was figuring out how the transition was going to work, much of which was relatively undefined. The task was to turn the skin into tiny tiles that transformed out of the way to reveal the robot inside. Once the geometry had been rotomated and exported as a geometry cache, it was brought into Houdini. A cloud of points was generated off the mesh and little pre-modeled tiles were stamped across the geometry.

But covering the body in tiny tiles was only the first step. Now they had to follow controlled animations in what is recognizable as the Transformers style. DD needed to break up the body into facets that were “procedurally eroded,” said Butler “That required tracking a constantly deforming object of this girls clothes, skin, being able to transition to an all CG version, have her break apart the mechanical piece to reveal the under skeleton, predominantly using Houdini and eventually handing off to key frame Maya hand animation. It’s a lot of complicated systematic reveal maps that drive procedural animation at the surface level. Everything is broken apart lighting wise into the most laborious technical lighting passes to concatenate all this together at the end.”

However, because the robot had triple jointed arms and large spikes, the robot inside didn’t really fit inside the digital scan of the actress, so the robot inside was also put into transformation mode. Choreographing that transition and determining the sizes of the tiles was the longest task. “Everything would affect everything,” said Palop, “all the variables would have a visual impact on the final result. We had to go back and forth, it took us months. And months. And months, to find a combination of the variable that we were happy with.” By working backwards from the frame that fully reveals the inner robot and using Nuke to morph, the tiles that appeared at skin level were targeted to join the robot underneath, inheriting the coloration of the robot, from one to the other.