The Energon Pub

News Credits: 972 · by **i_amtrunks** » Tue Jun 23, 2009 5:42 pm

Sci-Fi Wire have revealed that certain scenes in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen forced ILM to create new software in an interview with Industrial Light and Magic's Visual effects supervisor Scott Farrar.

One location in particular created problems for the ILM team in terms of maintaining realism and it should be noted for those who have yet to see the film that the following information does contain spoilers.
Revenge of the Fallen also required the visual effects artists to figure out how to put big metal robots underwater. You've seen snippets in the trailer of Decepticons diving to bring up Megatron's carcass. ILM developed a plug-in to their software that adjusted the animation to look like it's underwater.

Animating the Decepticons at the bottom of the ocean also required plenty of work regarding the lighting of the scene, and what the lighting would showcase:
We had a lot of deep-sea underwater research photos that we looked at, and we sort of gleaned from that. How clear do we want to be? How much plankton and spinaci, we called it, floating in front of the camera do we want? All these little tricks to try and make you believe you're really underwater, we have to employ."

Also of note is that a scene set late in the movie caused some problems for the ILM render farm:
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.

To check out the full Sci-Fi Wire interview with Scott Farrar, please click here.

by **TheSuperUngieReport** » Tue Jun 23, 2009 6:15 pm

Wow, exploding hardware! 8-}

by **Knock Out** » Tue Jun 23, 2009 6:41 pm

Hmm, wonder if the ILM folks slipped R2-D2 in ROTF like they did Star Trek. :-B

News Credits: 1 · by **T-Macksimus** » Tue Jun 23, 2009 6:59 pm

Bay made it into the Guinness Book with explosions for this film so it stands to reason that EVERYTHING was getting blown up this time around!
I've actually seen this happen before. It's wild to watch and smells like a greatly scaled down version of a car fire. It also sucks incredibly for the person that owns the system it happens to. I'm just glad it wasn't my computer that I got to watch go *poof*.