I used to work in a visual effects and 3d Animation company for a couple of years, so I’m quite aware of things like render time and stuff like that. But holy crap some of these numbers make my head spin!
Apparently Michael Bay posted some fun facts about Transformers 2 and some of these are REALLY interesting from a technical point of view. Be careful… one or two of these facts might be considered minor spoilers (not really in my opinion… but you might):
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
* Optimus Prime will be life size on IMAX screens in many forest fight shots.
* Imax frames take about 6 times longer than anamorphic to render.
* IMAX frame render times: As high as 72 hours per frame!
ILM screen time
ILM Screen Time is about 51 minutes.
Devastator
* Devastator is as tall as a 10 story building.
* Devastator has more than 10 times the number of individual parts found in an average car.
* Laid out end to end, Devastator’s parts would be almost 14 miles long.
Devastator totals
* Number of geom pieces: 52632
* The total number of polygons: 11,716,127
* The total length of all pieces: 73090 feet
* The total length of all pieces: 13.84 miles
