Tripredacus Council

[Verno]

Fair enough - it's quite possible that if Mainframe wasn't subject to time and budget that the Tripedacus Council would have been entirely metallic, or silver and red, or actually looked like Tripedacus. In the scene itself, the 'red' bits clearly react to light in a different way to the metallic body armour, so there is something different about them, and if those bits were in the real world looking like that, in a room with that balance of white and red light they would have to be red. It may well be that it's just a bad attempt at red lighting using digital animation, but I don't think there's anything empirical enough to argue that this guy coloured his own custom toys incorrectly.

The Animators were clearly going for an ominous/eerie/foreboding aesthetic with the red lights glowing from below, much like a torch held under the chin to tell ghost stories. I believe the 3 red lights alone weren't enough to give the Director the look he desired though, so the Animators simply rendered some parts of the Tripredacus Council members red, to help with the effect.

Here's an extract from the Beast Wars: Agenda Part 1 script:

INT. TRIPREDICUS COUNCIL ROOM
START TIGHT on an emergency light in the tabletop as it FLICKERS ON. PULL BACK as we SEE that its dim redness vaguely illuminates the robot face of GENERAL RAMHORN. The two other members of the Tripredacus Council, GENERAL SEACLAMP and GENERAL CICADACON, are also dimly visible around the table.

Sadly that's all the script can give us in regards to the setting, but it certainly tells us what the Writer (none other than Bob Forward himself) had envisioned in his mind.

I think I'd have to agree here, as there is just enough evidence to favour BOTH "for" & "against" - I think what we have here is a rushed CG scene that was a product of its time, unfortunately being ambiguous enough to be confusing to this day.

Colouring/lighting aside; one has to admit that he's physically rendered the scene superbly, as I'm mightily impressed with their head-sculpts myself.

Yes, the TFWiki mentions the time constraints the Animators were under, so it's a shame we didn't get 3D models of a greater detail. I'm confident we'll see them again, one day...

And oh yes, I'm by no means disrespecting the modelling work by Unicron9 - they've come out superbly, as with his other pieces. And if they'd been solid grey all over, they'd have looked a bit odd and boring, but the boldness of the red is just a touch too far for me.