Visual effects artists have a wide variety of jobs to do, from simple Chroma Keying to making extreme weather look as real as possible, but there’s one viz fx job that looks like a whole lotta messy fun- the destruction supervisor.
It’s their job to make sure the destruction we see on the big screen looks as realistic as possible without sacrificing visual appeal, plus they make sure the whole thing is understandable and doesn't become one big blurry mess to the audience.
Industrial Light & Magic's Michael Balog is one of these lucky artists who gets to spend his days destroying stuff for feature films, and he has torn all sorts of virtual environments down for all four Transformers films and Pacific Rim, just to name a few.
Michael shared all kinds of secrets with io9 about how he makes digital destruction look good for the big screen, and revealed some of the challenges he faced when plotting the destruction contained within each film.
The conversation is accompanied by some fantastic concept art by Wesley Burt, Robert Simons and John J. Park, which shows not only the destructive side of these films but also the characters who cause the chaos.
"...all four Transformers films..."