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"We began working on this movie in October of 2003," recalls Rob Coleman, Animation Director of Revenge of the Sith. "In terms of animation, we had 1,269 shots that we animated. To put that into perspective, for Episode I we did 60 minutes of animation. For Episode II, we did 70 minutes. In this one we did 90 minutes."

To handle such a large job, the animators needed tools that allowed them to achieve their shots with specific finesse, and that could be customized to handle the volume of animation required. They turned to Maya, the standard in high-end animation software from Alias. "Because of George [Lucas] pushing us, we had to create new tools and new ways to work, and Maya was a large part of how we solved very challenging creative problems."

Thousands of starships tangle in the atmosphere high above Coruscant, each producing scores of laser beams, explosions and flak hits. The elements quickly began to multiply. "George wanted this [space battle] to be bigger and better than the one in Jedi. That's the high water mark right now," says Coleman. "He wanted the flying to be much more realistic. He saw what ILM had done with Pearl Harbor, and he asked me specifically if I could get those guys and have them do the opening space battle. That was Scott Benza, Glenn Mcintosh and Paul Kavanagh and others. They created a flight rig that handled all the realism -- all the buffeting, bouncing and moving."

Also animated in large numbers were the soldiers of the Clone Wars: the clone troopers, Wookiee warriors and battle droids that would populate the sprawling battlefields. Equipping and animating these soldiers was facilitated by customizing tools to meet these needs. Technical Animator Supervisor James Tooley and his team led the development and scripting of tools to create efficient ways to arm an army.

"The tools were animator-friendly," says Coleman. "It made it very easy to place clones into ships, or guns onto clones, or different weapons onto Wookiees, because we'd have one master Wookiee and 15 different props. They created buttons for our animators so they could just click on it, and it would connect directly to the creature that they wanted and it would wrap the fingers around the weapons and constrain them to it. That really was an advantage to us."

This customization kept animators animating, and not fretting about the technology. "I remember when I started [years ago], I had fingerprints all over my monitor because I really wanted to reach in and grab it and move it just a little bit," says Coleman. Now, the process has become much more animator-friendly thanks to custom tools developed by ILM.

"It was very creative software with huge-time savings which really helped us do what we do." Given the scale of Episode III, every second saved was rendering time earned. One final big number: the shots of Episode III resulted in a total rendering time of 6,598,928 hours, spread across the rendering farms of multiple processors. To do it on a single system running continuously, it would take over 750 years to produce.

Don't try that at home.

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Star Wars Galaxies-Path to the Force-Episode 4

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