Darin Hilton Art and Design

TRANSFORMERS 2+3

Transformers 2+3

Concepts, matte paintings and 3d environments

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Overlook of some Ancient Egyptian ruins I added for a battle sequence from Transformers 2

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Aerial view of the Quarry where Devastator transforms, Iadded debris and detail to the quarry location.

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During the opening of Transformers 3 a moon mission discovers a crashed alien ship. I painted ship detail and lighting onto a rough 3d render.

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Another view of the crashed ship as the astronauts approach. In addition to adding in details and lighting to the ship, I added rock and ground detail to the environment using Nasa imagery.

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Interior matte painting of Arc Nemesis. this was reprojected back onto the mesh geometry. Since we were on a tight deadline for this shot, I used parts from the hero robots themselves to build the environment, detailing it all over a weekend.

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Establishing shot of Chernobyl. This was shot at a location near Chicago, I added signage to the buildings, the Chernobyl reactor building, distant soviet style structures, trucks, buildings and trees.

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Interior Chernobyl concept development.

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My final Chernobyl reactor concept.

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Combining models from the ILM library with custom geometry I dressed the shot to match the minimal set footage.

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Render of the scene with lighting and minimal textures

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Matte painting of the Chernobyl environment. Each seperate layer was projected back onto the mesh geometry in ILM's proprietary software Zeno.

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Transformers 2 + 3

A sampling of my work over both films, Whatever people may think of them critically, the projects were always fun to work on with lots of imaginative and challenging shots to complete. I was lucky enough to work on two of the films while I at ILM (I was a texture painter on the original Transformers at Digital Domain) creating concept art, traditional 2d matte paintings and projected 3d matte paintings for the films.

While working on Transformers 3 I travelled to Chicago where they were filming a large chunk of the invasion sequence. It was a real blast to be able to look in on set and see the onset production team at work and while there I was introduced to actors Josh Duhamel and Shia LaBeouf. We were primarily there to shoot HDR environment spheres for lighting and reflections using ILM's automatic rig. This involved many hours sitting on the edge of tall rooftops (I have a slight fear of heights) setting the rig in motion and making sure to keep the battery packs and motors cool with ice packs and fighting back the vertigo.

I also got to meet director Michael Bay at the Chicago wrap party, he was extremely gracious, telling those around us that we were the people who made his stuff look great. He was also very complimentary of my concept of the Nuclear reactor core, which is always nice to hear from a director.