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Released on May 19, 2005, Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith marked the climactic finale of George Lucas’s prequel trilogy. The film pulled fans into Anakin Skywalker's emotional transformation, the fall of the Jedi Order, and the rise of Darth Vader—all set against the backdrop of stunning space battles and rich character work.
Behind the spectacle, Industrial Light & Magic teams were innovating at every level to make Lucas’s vision real. Among them was Tim Naylor, now co-founder of ExoTools, who tackled three key challenges in production that shaped how artists interacted with animation tools and with environments themselves.
Tim’s first significant contribution was rigging the Buzzdroids—those spider-like saboteurs seen crawling across Obi-Wan’s starfighter in the opening sequence. “It was my first character that had to interact with its environment,” Tim recalls. The rig needed to detect when a leg intersected the ship’s NURBS-modeled surface and disable its inverse kinematics automatically. “With a bit of dot product math magic,” the droids could cling convincingly without endless animator tweaking—a massive time-saver in a tight pipeline.
In another shot, Tim played the “cable guy”—literally. Simulating secondary motion on a massive pipe and dangling cable, he pushed Maya’s then-new hair system to add natural movement that enriched realism without distracting from the action. “Those small touches matter,” he says. “It’s the subtle dynamics that tip a shot from ‘good’ to ‘believable.’”
Perhaps most impactful was the Crewing Tool Tim helped build—a behind-the-scenes utility that automated the complex task of pairing pilots with ships across massive battle scenes. By linking rigs based on show data, animators could populate sequences quickly and focus on performance rather than setup. “It made a galaxy far, far away feel just a bit more connected,” Tim says.
Two decades later, Revenge of the Sith stands as a cinematic milestone and a masterclass in problem-solving under pressure. It’s a story of artists, developers, and dreamers crafting digital lifeforms that could crawl, fly—and sometimes fall to the Dark Side.
At ExoTools, we’re proud to carry that same spirit forward—empowering creators with tools that support character, performance, and unforgettable storytelling.
