This is Cybertron. The planet that both Decepticons and Autobots call home.
In the final short, you only see it for three seconds, but it's the opening shot, which means that I spent a great deal of time on creating it. Today, I'm going to show a behind the scenes look at how I made it.
---
Now, I know I was going to talk about the transformations, but this isn't going as fast as I had previously thought it would. Unfortunately, even though Optimus is done, I don't have enough transformers models finished to do a full, in-depth look at the transformations yet. You'll just have to wait a bit longer, I'm afraid. So, Cybertron it is!
In War of Ends, Cybertron appears as a large, robotic planet, with a large crater near the top, (where the Omega War was fought).
Towards the bottom are naturally formed hexagonal ridges that serve as borders for the cities. The Autobot capital Iacon is marked with a large Autobot symbol, dug by the Constructibots, that's so gigantic it can be seen from space.
Farther south, nearer the crater at the top, are Decepticon-controlled cities, such as Kaon, where, in a deserted area near the city Kolkular, the story begins.
---
I created Cybertron with a new method, one that I haven't used before but is extremely effective. Instead of creating a texture and a bumpmap, as I usually do, instead I created a texture and then a displacement texture to use as a displacement map. A displacement is a modifier, (it "modifies" a mesh), that uses a texture as a base for distorting geometry. Because of this, the crater is actually a part of the mesh. If it was just a texture on the mesh, it wouldn't curve inward. I used two lights, one is the "sun" and is the main light source, illuminating the rim of the planet. Then there is a secondary blue light that is there to pretend that the glowing circuits on the dark side of Cybertron are glowing. If I turned it off, you wouldn't see the the texture on that side and the image would look spare. The glowing circuits were one of my ideas, although I took some inspiration from several iterations of Cybertron as portrayed in various cartoons. They are a separate emissive texture that's overlaid over the normal one.
Overall I wanted a sense of grandeur to the opening shot, which was originally going to be the Nemesis. The new opening is way better, as it zooms in to the ship all the way from outer space, letting the story start slowly and start picking up the pace later.
Anyway, I'm afraid I can't promise you a post for a few days, but that doesn't necessarily mean there won't be one. I'll keep updating you as this short moves steadily through production.
