Escalating Visual Effects for Transformers 2

A new article from VFX World talks about how Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen raised the bar in visual effects for movies. The challenge for Industrial Light & Magic was creating the more complicated effects of 46 robots rather than the first movie's 16 while making them bigger, more complicated and at the scale IMAX requires all in the about the same amount of time it took to do the first film. Below are the highlights from the three page article that is worth the read as its amazing the details that have to be considered when creating a CGI sequence. Thanks to a site fan for the link.

- 46 robots in sequel, 14 robots in first
- ILM had about same amount of time to do the increased demands of the second movie as did for the first.
- Takes around 12 weeks to build the model and then another 12-15 weeks to do the rigging and painting for each robot in the computer.
- ILM created 60 builds for ROTF, Digital Domain also designed a few including Alice.
- Disc storage went from 20TB for first film to 150TB.
- Crew size maxxed out to 350 to reach deadline.
- Devastator, if in the real world, would be 150 feet high and Jetfire would be 50 feet tall.
- "both Michael Bay and Scott Farrar wanted to introduce the fact that these characters are alive. Drooling and spitting and bleeding and breathing. Rather than mechanical beasts standing around."
- "[Jetfire] has a sneer at one point, so we had to redesign the face and the eye area so he could wince," Farrar explains.
- "We utilized a lot of martial arts influences and spent about two months doing previs for forest fight sequence and did a full three-minute animatic (in Maya) before the plates were shot for that sequence. "
- "It took 72 hours per frame to render Devastator. We tried a little bit of everything for the forest fight. It's still an action sequence but the hard part was shooting thematically. We know the IMAX people tell you to slow the camera down and lock it off. Well, that's not how Michael shoots. We have pause moments, where you see the characters slow down, but then we have high speed and go back and forth that way."
- "People in computer graphics don't want to reduce motion blur, but the problem with the robots is that they have so many little pieces that they become artifacts with so many sharp things moving through the frame. I found it's better to reduce motion blur in certain moments, like when Bumblebee comes close or Starscream has moments in the forest fight and Optimus and Megatron, where we reduce motion blur to half, a third and an eighth."
- ...the breaking apart of a pyramid top was eight times bigger than the previous ILM rigid simulation record. It only required four or five shots but that took seven months just to create the simulation of the blocks tumbling and being torn apart by Devastator.