Hey - I searched for a thread on this but couldnt find one, but whatever. Just curious how hasbro\tak actually make their toys...specifically the movie line...the toys are pretty darn accurate to the movie, and im wondering if all the concept art for the movie is complete and hasbro does their best to copy it, or is the idea quickly drawn, then a toy is created best to the ability of Hasb and then its tweaked by the CGI to make it as realistic as possible without changing the fundamental parts of the charactor? is there a site that explains how transformers are made in general?
I think it's concept art, then toy, which explains inaccuracies like TF1 Leader Prime and ROTF Leader Megatron.
Pretty sure that's correct. There's the concept artwork, which is a start-point for both Hasbro/Takara and ILM/other effects groups. Each group tweaks the designs to suit their needs (effects people to improve the concept and make it better or easier to work with in the movie, Hasbro to make a design work better as a toy.) with back-and-forth communication to try to keep the final design consistent as much as possible. The issue is that the toy design has to be "locked down" much sooner than the CGI effect, to allow for production and distribution time, while the CGI designs could conceivably keep changing until the final shots are committed to film. There may be a few 'last minute' things which get changed in the toys to make them more CGI-accurate, usually the head sculpt. (2007 Megatron and ROTF Mixmaster being more obvious examples)
Show-accuracy - Transformers Wiki The thing with the movie is that communication was actually rather poor, as we've learned from the interviews with the Japanese designers. They get concept art and occasional updates and have to work from that. They didn't see the finished designs until the movie came out. Similarly they had no idea Jolt was still in the movie until they saw the theatrical trailer, so they had to rush back and finish the work on his figures.
If you dig through the pictures from Botcon 2007's Hasbro tour, you'll see some pictures I and several others took where Archer is actually describing the process of developing the movie toys and basically "what we can do vs. what your design looks like". So the short answer is (for the movie line, anyway) concept art first, then toy design. EDIT: Link for your convenience: http://www.tfw2005.com/transformers-images/events/Botcon-2007/Hasbro-Tour/
As others have said, it's most definitely concept art, then toys. Yellow ROTF Rampage is a pretty clear example of the result of this.
Toys are based on the concept art (which isn't "CGI"*) then the CGI is done. *There have been discussions on whether a digital painting is "CGI." It comes down to this - within the industry, CGI is considered a seperate form of computer graphics from digital painting and it is not an all encompassing term. That is what the term means, even if it seems like it shouldn't.
Concept designs have to be pitched to studios, prototypes based on the concept designs then have to be pitched to Hasbro before both the media and the toys start going through production. And hopefully both meet a specific deadline and can be released in tandem. Or close to it. Or in RotF's case, the toys being part of the promo blitz leading up to the release of them film.
Is it the time of day or something? Is the server that loaded? I'm double posting like crazy right now.