Transforming the movie industry

I’m pretty excited about Transformers 2. If you’re a guy you probably understand why already.

If you’re not excited – then you should be. Director Michael Bay has given some reasons why on his blog.

I will not reproduce his post in full. Here are some highlights…

Robots

14 robots last time, 46 robots this time (ILM only)
If you had all the gold ever mined in the history of man, you could build a little more than half of Devastator.
Optimus Prime will be life size on IMAX screens in many forest fight shots.
Devastator’s hand is traveling 390 miles per hour when he punches the pyramid.
The pyramid destruction simulation was 8 times bigger than the old rigid simulation all-time record holder at ILM.
All robot parts laid out end to end would stretch from one side of California to the other, about 180 miles
Devastator’s parts stacked tip to tip would be as tall as 58 empire state buildings.
If all the texture maps on the show were printed on 1 square yard sheets, they would cover 13 football fields.

Disk space

TF1 took 20 Terabytes of disk space. Trans2 took 145 Terabytes. Seven times bigger!
145 terabytes would fill 35,000 DVDs. Stacked one on top of the other without storage cases, they would be 145 feet tall.

Rendering times

If you rendered the entire movie on a modern home PC, you would have had to start the renders 16,000 years ago (when cave paintings like the Hall of Bulls were being made) to finish for this year’s premiere!
A single imax shot in the movie (df250) would have taken almost 3 years to render on a top of the line home PC running nonstop.
IMAX frame render times: As high as 72 hours per frame!

Imax