Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen fried ILM's mainframe

[ManaByte]

http://scifiwire.com/2009/06/how-the-giant-robot-fx-in.php

Visual-effects supervisor Scott Farrar was in charge of turning Industrial Light & Magic's computers up to 11 to create the new characters and told reporters that the sequel features 40 new characters. That and 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.

"We did, we lost some machinery that night," Farrar said in a press conference on last week in Beverly Hills, Calif. "Little puffs of smoke, just like in the movie."

 

[T'Baio]

That's basically true, but there are some flaws in the reporting.

The computer wasn't rendering, it was trying to make sense of the movie.

 

[IJD GAF]

As I recall, the waterfall scene in Cars did the same thing to Pixar's computers. I wonder how often this sort of thing occurs in ambitious CGI projects.

 

[Venardhi]

I imagine it was just normal hardware failure from running the farm for long periods of time. Makes a nice story, but computers don't explode just 'cause you're rendering out a more complicated scene at a higher resolution. The computer is still doing exactly the same process at whatever performance it is capable of, just taking longer to do it.

 

[IJD GAF]

Well to correct myself, the Pixar story didn't involve explosions. It just caused a major crash, if I recall correctly.

The explosion business seems a little too over the top. But hey, it's a Michael Bay flick.