"Transformers 2" Robots Almost Broke ILM

I can’t sum up this story better than this paragraph straight from the source (scifiwire.com):

"Visual-effects supervisor Scott Farrar was in charge of turning Industrial Light & Magic’s computers up to 11 to create the new characters and told reporters that the sequel features 40 new characters. That and the increased resolution of the characters for new IMAX footage nearly exhausted ILM’s render farms: After one hard night of rendering computer-generated footage, some of the hardware actually exploded."

Yes, folks:
"the hardware actually exploded."

Michael Bay is so obsessed with explosions that he needs to make them happen WITH his movies, not just IN his movies. MY GOD.

OK, I will admit I’m a little impressed by that in and of itself. Still doesn’t make me want to see the movie.

The article is very interesting in a tech-geeky way, and what they’ve accomplished is beyond insane. To whit:

"To give you some sense of just how big Devastator is, Farrar said that Optimus Prime has 10,000 moving parts. The computer algorithms actually manipulate each part to go from truck to standing robot. Well, Devastator is made up of upwards of 80,000 parts."

The best analogy I can come up with for this is that it’s like building the Taj Mahal and then filling it with stray cats, roaches, and metric tons of shit.

They spent an awful lot of time and effort on making the robots do things that no one can actually follow and on characters that no one can differentiate. Seriously, folks, it’s gonna suck. But at least you know a whoooooollle lotta effort went into making it suck so hard. Yowza.