The working relationship between California-based Doug and France’s Sparx* was conducted mostly via Internet.

Tell us about the technical aspects of the production.

AP: Robota was completed by a total of 10 people over a period of six months. A mix of Maya, RenderMan and Flame was used to create the trailer. We employed over 200 Sparx* plug-ins and Mel scripts to animate the cloth in the robots' capes and create the complex particles found throughout the trailer.

A lot of work went into developing render setups and the robots' dynamics. Random movements were skillfully mastered during the grass field shot in which more than 169 robots were animated. This shot was one of the most technically complex, involving moving depth of field over 20 layers of grass, 20 layers of robots, 15 layers of shadows, five layers of clouds and lightning, four layers of particles of floating pollen, as well as smoke dynamic simulations.

We used Maya Fluid to create the ocean in the shot with the city floating above the sea. Paint Effects was used to create the shots' waterfalls. A large part of the film’s rendering was done with Maya. The desert ground was created with RenderMan. We also used our own in-house software called Albedo, which is one of numerous software packages compatible with Renderman.

Two modules make up Albedo, Castor, which is the RenderMan part enabling motion blur, displacement mapping, etc., and Pollux, which covers raytracing functionalities. Each shot was rendered in multiple layers and then combined in flame or inferno. For the Kaantur shots, the fully CG water required 40 layers to be composited and another 20 for the city itself.

All the material in the trailer was composited at 1K resolution for the teaser, but the final film will be done at 2K and 12-bit (Cineon).

Would you describe the process by which you take one of Doug's drawings and turn it into a scene?

AP: The teaser was directed long distance via the Internet over a period of six months. During this period, face-to-face contact was made only once between both parties. Doug's pen and airbrush drawings were sent by email. Sparx* returned a phenomenal number of tests over to Doug in San Francisco for validation. The main objective was to show Doug that we were capable of producing exactly what he had in mind, up to the very last detail, while pushing our technical capabilities to the next level.