Habib Zargarpour, CG Supervisor for Episode I: One of the more difficult special effects shots in Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace was in the Podrace sequence when Mars Guo's Podracer crashes into the desert floor after Sebulba throws a wrench into his left engine. The challenge was to make a physically realistic crash of this massive Podracer (the largest of the bunch both in terms of size as well as number of parts) at a speed of 600 miles an hour! We knew that we had to show all the metal and actual parts of the model bending and twisting as they get crushed. Doing these shots as miniatures would involve throwing models onto sand at 100 miles an hour and hoping some of it would end up on film, making it very expensive, or even prohibitive, without much control given the number of Podracers that had to crash. The computer model for Mars Guo's Podracer had the intricacies we needed, but we cut that up into even smaller pieces, a total of about 14,000, and an additional 100,000 pieces of smaller debris that came from inside it.
The main Podracer parts were "crashed" using a physics-based dynamic "simulation" with Maya software, including thousands of actual parts from the CG model that were torn off. We had to invent a way to make the larger metal parts crush and twist as they impacted the ground or other pieces. Then came the sand and dirt simulation with millions of particles, the smoke and flames, and sparks, all while the Podracer and the camera are traveling at over 600 miles an hour. So the number of different demolition elements combined with the level of realism and the high speeds made for a very difficult task to create this destruction shot.
Habib Zargarpour is Associate Visual Effects Supervisor at ILM. He joined the company as a technical director on The Mask, after working as an illustrator since 1981. A graduate of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, he stumbled into 3D graphics in 1990 while designing for a film and considers the medium to be "the perfect mix" of the technical and artistic worlds.
