After looking at the toy protos, I started to wonder about how they could get the vehicle modes to look like the robot modes with the necessary simplified transformations. I'm sure the movie characters and the toys will have completely different transformations that are pretty straight-forward, despite having a million panels shift around in the process... so I suppose this thread is more directed toward the toys.

I'll start with Jazz:


>>>The movie transformation:



The grill basically stays where it is, while the foglight panels sort of fold up behind it.

The upper arms are made up of the front fenders, and the front weels mak up the shoulders. Those vents you see up by the shoulders are the vents on the side of the car, just in front of the doors.

The forarms in the sketch look like they are at least partially made from the front corners of the car (I think I see a headlight by his wrist in the picture).

The front of the thighs are the rear bumper, and the side of the thighs seem to be made up of the doors (those spikes up by his waist are probably the side mirrors).

The lower legs/feet don't resemble too much, so I assume it's just the rear end of the car shattered into pieces, with the rear wheels forming the heels.

>>>The toy transformation





You can see how the hood is split down the middle, with hinges on the sides. My guess is that these parts fold up and out to the sides, and end up wrapping around the front fender. This would help make the limbs look bulky and add to the kibble-less look they're going for.

The lower arms are probably just sitting under the car.

The front bumper/grill area of the car probably transforms very similarly to how it does on the movie model.

Seeing as how how there is a double hinge from the trunk to the roof/seating area of the car, I would bet we end up with a fat backpack on this guy. The doors might fold up in there.

The rear bumper looks like it will fold out to form the feat, and I would be surprised if the legs weren't just sitting under the car as undercarraige.





Anyways, I thought it would be fun to try to figure out the transformations, since all we have is concept art and vehicle modes right now. Post your own, I'll post some more, etc.

 

I think on the toy, the hood and the headlight section make up the lower arms and the part just behind the front wheels looks to be a part of the upper arms.
For some reason I think the doors might be a part of the legs, somewhere on the back.. Also the rear wheels might end up somewhere around the heels when in robot mode..

I'm so psyched about these toys! Man, can't wait to see the robot modes!!

 

Here's all I can come up with...

 

I think you got it
now how about prime and bumblebee they look very confusing

 

I tried to do Prime, by following the flames and coloring, but the legs in the concept pictures seems to suggest that his hips are at the rear of the truck and his legs make up the back part of the cab...

 

The legs were hard to do, and I'm not sure where the fenders for the rear wheels would go... This is hard! I can't wait to see how it's actually done!

 

The Prime CGI model from the Magic Clothes show, this one:



Is more cleaned up than the concept art and has added stuff, like smokestacks and different proportions. There is more red on the outside of the legs and the waist looks a bit cleaner.

Doesn't mean its any simpler to figure out... But i think you're on the right track. I just wonder how the toy will translate turning the sleeper section of the cab into lower leg armor. The forming of arms-legs-chest is plausible enough but details like that makes me worried.

 

I think that the front transforms into most of the legs, and that the rear wheels form the back half of the upper legs. As for the fenders, I think that those red bits next to his 'grill' are part of the fenders, and that the rest folds away inside the body.

 

regarding prime, I just cant see it.
if you look at the truck, you'll see blue flames on the fron of the car and on top of the rear wheels. but where on the robot-mode is these blue flames?

cant someone pick the pic apart and try show how the parts fit in eachother...

 

I think the front ones are included in the arm transformation (maybe they slide away, or are inverted?). No idea where the rear ones go...

 

i must say the more that i look at these there more i can see roughly what's going on. there's definitely a lot of moving of internal parts. for prime it looks like the whole of the cab front lifts off the wheels and swings back, meeting the rear wheels, with the sleeper section swinging down onto the leg section.

Similarly with Bumblebee rear wheels form the feet but the rear wheel arches are the hips (more obvious in the 2007 Camaro version), while the rear lights and exhaust pipe form the back.

So it definitely looks like internal parts move about a hell of a lot to acheive this which is definitely a fantastic feat of engineering, even if it is just virtual, and would be cool to see in toys

 

maybe a little TOO much moving parts?
because if you think about it - with enough twirling and swinging and moving around, you could turn anything into anything.

 

well i doubt it'll be the 'thousands of moving parts' that have been quoted. more likely dozens. and I don't think it's a bad thing these maye be more complex than previous Transformers. when I was a kid I would try and work out how all the characters transformed, but now I'm older it all seems a little too obvious to fascinate me, but these really are a challenge.

as for being able to turn anything into anything, I think that's really the point of Transformers being able to disguise themselves to fit in wherever they are. I mean if they want to do triple changers then how else are they goign to make a tnak into a plane when they have very little in common?

 

That's the thing though, when it gets right down to it there are still a few major pieces that flip, turn and twist to make up both modes. The 'thousands of moving parts' thing more then likely means the smaller details and paneling that just finish off the design, not make it up.

I get the feeling that BB's front wheels are his feet with his legs folded up underneath him. You can see the side vents from his car mode which sit just behind the doors on his thighs in robot mode. the top of the car makes up his chest and body, which is obvious, and his shoulders are the rear wheels. The arms seem to be either parts of the car roof/trunk or from the complete back of the car as you can see the stripe on parts of his shoulders.

I get the feeling that much of their transformations have a basis that can be found in their G1 versions. Prime seemingly being the biggest departure of that statement. But for the two other Auto-bots we've seen, or at least imo, this concept holds some truth to it. The toys will just be extremely over simplified versions of their movie counterparts and will show just how 'classic transformer'-like the movie designs really are.

 

yeah, exactly - I guess you could be right about the wheels, I assumed they were the other way round but both are equally possible. and to be honest the 'shells' of the vehicles don;t look like they brek up into that many pieces - they just look smaller because more of the internal structure is used in making the bot mode. so yeah, they do have a basic 'traditional' transfromation, just with more detail.

 

Chances are they won't exactly look like their movie counterparts, They have to simplfy it some where, or else they end up like rubik's cube. "It's the latest in the line, the Rubik's transformer. Available in Optimus Prime and Megatron."

 

You know, I never thought of that possiblity...But it's still obvious that his chest is the front of the car. Pretty weird...

 

Of course it will be overly simplified. In the old movie we had a very complex transformation of Unicron where there were seemingly hundreds of panels and things that folded on itself and rotated. Did we get anything complex in the toy? Nope. The toy was a very simple transormation of what we saw on TV.

Generally, the bigger something is on TV the more complex it is. Very hard to bring that down to scale. In this movie we are in live action so the resolution of detail is FAR greater than what we could ever see in the cartoons. I think if we took the same simplicity and apply it to live resolutions it would look like very big simple pieces ... kind of like those big block legos and I don't want to see that. Yep ... greatly simplified versions is what we will have to get, unless they will make a very expensive giant toy that has all the detail.

 

like the 'Movie Ultimate' toy for $79.99 seen on target computers

 

Damn, I hope that's an Alternator Movie Prime or Blackout...That would make me a very happy fan.