LogInOne of the most complex assets at the time.
Transformers: Dark of the Moon was released in 2011, more than a decade ago, but could already amaze viewers with its fantastic CGI. One of the most memorable scenes in the movie was the giant Driller destroying a skyscraper.
VFX artist Rassoul Edji shared that it was the most complex asset Industrial Light & Magic had done for Transformers by that point: it had 70,000 individual parts, over 7 times more than Optimus Prime did.
"This sequence where it is crushing the skyscraper took 288 hours per frame to render with all of the reflections and simulations," he said. "During the last weekend, ILM used their entire render farm, amounting to 200,000 rendering hours per day which is 22.8 years of rendering time in 24 hours."
ILM
According to Edji, this is because there are lots of tiny bits of glass that "have refractions and reflections which need to be computed against the characters, the environment, the lighting, and even the explosions and their lighting."
ILM
You can see ILM's work on transformations in the recently released Transformers One here if you're a fan of the franchise. Also, don't miss the VFX behind Alice turning into her Decepticon Pretender self in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, created by Digital Domain.
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