Yeah. The Beast Wars animators actually created the animation models based off 3D scans of the toys themselves! That's why Beast Wars has a pretty good degree of toy-accuracy (especially compared to G1). The majority of Transformers were made as toys first, then comic/cartoon models second. Movie Transformers are part of the exception to the rule...Originally Posted by LordCyrusOmega
The inherent problem with designing Transformers as screen characters first is that animators don't need to think about how their designs are going to translate as toys. Sometimes the animators will work in tandem with toy designers (e.g. G1 Hot Rod, Kup, Galvatron, Transformers Animated etc.) - which tends to work better, but still not as good as just making the toys straight up. With the movies they just designed the Transformers purely as screen characters. Hasbro had relatively minimal input into modifying the designs, only stepping on a rare occasion, e.g. with Optimus Prime(movie Optimus Prime design <--note the split tyres and blue chest; changed on Hasbro's behest)
But other than that, Dreamworks designers had pretty much free reign. And tbh, I can see why - because when you're trying to make the Transformers look photorealistic and have them move about naturally without cheating physics by "warping" them (as cartoon and comic artists do), then you have to make them look more complex. But unfortunately for HasTak, it makes it jolly hard to translate as toys; keeping within a certain price/size limit and time frame. The CGI movie model of Optimus Priem in the first movie has10,108 individual parts, 1,830,898 polygons, 27,744 rig nodes, and 2336 texture maps, with the volume of all pieces combined forming 154 cubic metres!That's not easy to translate into a relatively much smaller and simpler toy for kids! And as we can see with ROTF Leader OP, the more screen accurate they get, the trickier the toy is to transform - and arguably less fun to play with because it is so fiddly and tricky.
Hasbro owns Transformers and they have to approve everything, so I imagine that they would have the right to access any of the designs at any time. Transformers is Hasbro's property after all. More likely they had access to early designs... remember that it takes about a year to create a Transformer toy from conception to final product - and during that time it's not uncommon for artists to make changes. For example movie Megatron's head was initially going to look like this:
...but Dreamworks changed it because a lot of fans hated it and complained heaps. But by this stage, Hasbro had already designed a lot of products based on the old head; e.g. Legends Megatron's head is based on the abandoned old head design.
This is another pitfall of creating Transformers as screen characters first -- it's a lot easier to make late changes to drawn characters versus changing the toy. For example, toys like G1 Hot Rod, Blurr, Kup, Cyclonus, Scourge, Galvatron etc. were based on cartoon models made for Transformers The Movie, but the toys look different because they were based on earlier designs that were later changed.
So yeah, with the live action movies, having them as screen-designed characters first is unfortunately a necessity. Having said that, Hasbro can step in if a design just looks too weird and tell them to change it if they wanted to... like Alice... Aaron Archer kept on insisting that Transformers "don't morph" (despite the fact that they did during Beast Machines) and that having alt mode kibble was a defining feature of the Transformers... where the frell are Alice's alt mode kibble when she's in robot mode?? Gee, thanks a lot Dreamworks... she's gonna be a beeotch of a toy to design. Oh wait, Hasbro never bothered!
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