"This was really skillful artwork [hard surface modeling to build robots] -- basically, hand-painted 2D texture maps and a little bit of shader work," Koch suggests. "But there's a whole lot of development, of course, in just getting the assets so that they're correct and look right so we could go to this level of lighting refinement. The big innovations were making extremely high-resolution texture maps and making sure we could do hybrid rendering between ray tracing and non-ray tracing. And the internal innovation was the way we would bring assets into our rendering pipeline. We simplified the lighting pipeline so that when an asset comes in like a robot, the artists deal with a single entity and can drop it into the lighting structures. All of that is in service of being able to use the accurate modeling of the sets with the hybrid rendering geometry. Zeno allows you to be more true to off-the-shelf packages, with drag-and-drop lighting rather than typing everything in."

Several advancements were made for more realistic-looking lighting. Key and fill lights were very specifically used for each robot. Robots would actually go in and out of narrowed lights with barn doors just like on sets. 

Koch adds that the computing power had to be increased as well: "The level of detail that Michael wanted for the robots required us to make the models heavier than anything I've ever seen in my life. The amount of geometry, the amount of texture mapping could not have been achieved without 64-bit computing. The ILM render farm was upgraded at just the right time. Frankly, I'm amazed that we got all of this done because the load on the equipment was pretty astonishing: the amount of terabytes that was online and the amount of images that was rendered every night."

As for meeting the demands of hard surface modeling to build the robots, Koch explains that they had two or three people on set taking photographs from all angles that would be uploaded and shipped to ILM. "Up here we'd take commercially available software to stitch together high-res images, which we'd then map back onto the proxies of set geometries. In order to get the robots right, we'd first light simple gray and silver spheres until they fit into the environments. If we achieved that, usually we could take the heavy rendering assets that are the robots and put them in the same positions. In theory and practice, they were exposed to the same lighting on set. So if the spheres were right, the robots would just drop back in."

For Farrar, who hails from a photographic background, Transformers indeed represents a new watermark in ultra realistic hard body surfaces. "This had to be rendered and it's terribly complicated," he echoes. For instance, in addition to Optimus Prime's 10,108 parts, there are also 1.8 million polygons and 2,000 texture maps. Which is also why ILM developed dynamic rigging so the animators could deal with the large number of parts, interacting on the fly while paying attention to certain sections that they were animating. "Let's say you had a close-up," Farrar says, "and the animator only had to deal with one arm, shoulders and a head. They basically identify the area and grab that to simplify it."

Meanwhile, there were several advancements with regard to more realistic-looking lighting. "We were very specific as far as key lights and fill lights, not including the overall reflections: that was a given for each and every robot," Farrar continues. "So we had to plus that out. But then we added key lights, and shadows and cutters and flags, so our robots would actually go in and out of narrowed lights with barn doors just like you'd do on sets. I wanted you to see that these are really big guys, so that if a robot knelt down toward camera, he actually moved out of a key on his left side and it got darker there, and he moved into a right key, and you really felt the volume lighting in ways you haven't seen before.