Ever wonder how giant robots like the Transformers are brought to life? The final installment of ComicBook.com’s exclusive Transformers: Earth Wars developer diary series has all of the answers for you. The video goes behind-the-scenes at Space Ape Game to show you how the Autobots and Decepticons go from concepts to fully-animated 3D characters.
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“My job as a concept artist to take the essence of a character, how it’s appeared over various iterations from the cartoon until now, and distill that into technical drawings,” says concept artist Josh Atack.
The Space Ape team stresses that they were determined not to “cheat” when it comes to animating the characters’ transformations by using techniques like sudden model swaps. “We basically work out how all the different parts will break apart and then become the vehicle, just like when you have one of the toys,” says animator Neil Parkinson.
Cinematic artist Mark Tan has the job of lighting and adding other effects to the environments to make the models look spectacular. “What’s really interesting in my position is that our games are very much based on the G1 cartoons, but it’s born in this era of Michael Bay, and that’s what a lot of people are familiar with,” he says. “What I tried to do is return it back to the nostalgic, Saturday morning cartoon, pulpy cartoon style, which is a bit wacky but dramatic, but also try to anchor it in what people are familiar with.”
Be sure to check out the previous installments of the Transformers: Earth Wars developer diary series, the first of which includes an interview with Transformers writing legend Simon Furman, and the second of which shows how fans helped shape the game.
Transformers: Earth Wars launched last week, and is now available as a free download in the Apple App Store for iOS devices and via Google Play for Android.
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