Mk. 7 Suit Transformation

Those who like to get into the nitty-gritty details of design process might enjoy this.

To design the cruise missile I had to take Josh Herman's beautiful model of the Mk 7 and chop it up, re-articulating it so that I could pack the major components in as tightly as possible with a minimum of theoretical interpenetration. The other goal was to come up with a shape that would allow as much of the actual skin of the suit to be visible but unrecognizable as a suit until the transformation, with a minimum of added panels.



I liked the dynamic visual of ejectable fairing panels blowing off in flight like an ICBM as you'll see in the following clip. It's my first Modo test to come up with a process for transforming the "cruise missile" form of the Mk.7 suit into it's final form.

Modo is relatively limited in its animation tools, so this is necessarily crude. We knew the tough work would be carried out by the visual effects team, so I only had to go so far to give them a starting point. Ultimately in the movie I think there's more "Transformers" sleight-of-hand going on in the short sequence, but I like to think this gave them a jumping-off point.