Last year was a dream year for vfx artist Brad Herman, who worked on both Transformers (above) and Pirates 3. Transformers images © DreamWorks LLC/Paramount. 

Transformers and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. It’s not every vfx artist that gets to work on two Oscar-nominated movies in the same year. But 28-year-old Brad Herman is enjoying a good run at Venice-based Digital Domain, where he’s currently working as simulation lead on one of this year’s most anticipated releases, Speed Racer, the first directorial effort by the Wachowskis since The Matrix trilogy.

On both Transformers and At World’s End, Herman’s expertise in creating crowd effects with Massive and in building organizational pipelines came in handy. In fact, on the latter, Herman was called in to create the armada of ships, complete with individual crews. He began by assembling animation from previous projects to build a pirate army to crew the ships.

“We ended up using all the motions that we already had, but modifying them inside of Massive to make it look like they were doing things on the ships,” he says. A bit of custom animation was added to make some pirates do specific tasks, like climbing scaffolding, and the crews were added to more than a dozen different ships. Different versions of those ships were created by altering textures all through the background of the shots to create the final sequence.

“The first ship you have is real, the second ship is usually greenscreen and the third ship in back is Massive people,” he adds.

Transformers was a dream job for Herman, who grew up a fan of the robots in disguise. “It’s Transformers! How could you not want to work on it?”

Herman’s main job on the film was solving problems and he worked primarily on setting up the pipeline and the trailers -- in particular, the trailers’ morphing logo, which came to him as a file created by another effects company for another trailer.

“I don’t even know how many pieces of software they went through to actually make this. We got a Maya file in the end, but as far as we could tell, Max was involved at a couple of steps,” he suggests. He worked about three weeks on the file, which had about 1.5 million points and even more polygons. “I had to dissect it and sit there and build scripts, and basically find a way to move a million-and-a-half points of deforming data from Maya to Houdini and get it to load and be renderable and lightable. And I had start some textural work so it looked like metal for the director.”