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Hunter Rose

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Transformers: The Best Special Effects Ever?

 

Clicky for neat pics and the rest of the article.

 

More than 750 parts stretching a half-mile long. Some 350 engineers working round-the-clock. Thousands of rusty, old mechanic photos — clutch plates, transmissions, brake discs — spilling across the table. All for one beat-up Camaro? Sure doesn't sound like your average auto manufacturer.

 

"The idea is they're not fresh off the showroom floor," says Jeff White, the man charged with creating the yellow sports car and 13 others for a big new garage. He's right: They're supposed to look realer than that. And be from outer space. And turn into 30-ft. robots. And save the universe.

 

That's all in a day's work for the motor magicians at George Lucas's Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), who for the last two years have been juggling the limits of the possible (turning a real car into a fake robot and figuring out what the heck to put inside) and the demands of reality (studio budgets, GM sponsorship, the wrath of fanboys worldwide) to build the most painstaking — and maybe most believable — effects achievement in movie history: Transformers.

 

When it revs up at the box office this Fourth of July, Michael Bay's $150 million adaptation of the legendary 1980s cartoon and toy series will include nearly 50 so-called transformations. Hand-rendered metallic uncorkings of real-life cars, trucks and helicopters represented uncharted territory for the gooey-alien experts at ILM, each transformation taking six months to imagine and each re-engineering the way digital Hollywood does computer graphics imagery (CGI).

 

"How are we gonna get this thing from a car into the robot and back in a believable way?" White, the film's digital production supervisor, asked the Transformers crew in 2005, when, after their back-and-forth with toymaker Hasbro, the F/X plan consisted of little more than robot sketches and shiny new Hummers — and not much in between. "Of course, Michael Bay wants a lot of energy, he wants ninja-fighting warriors that can punch and put their arms over their heads and do all this crazy stuff," White says. "So we had to design these really complicated systems — how do all these systems match together and fly over each other to keep it looking real? And that was a huge challenge."

Continued...
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*Flees before some Ahole ruins this thread by stating (and Starscreaming for an hour) about how 'ever' is invalid as a term*

 

But yeah best special effects Ive seen so far

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Damn good article. Best FX thus far ever made, damn right!

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What ends up on the silver screen this week is something that for once actually looks silver, justifiably chrome. Bay even had to send back one of the few non-CGI scale models made for the film — a painted fiberglass Bumblebee made for a scene when the Autobot savior is tied to train tracks — because it didn't look real enough

 

bumblebee was tied to train tracks?

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Nice find. Anyone who has done any 3D modeling, texturing, or animation can appreciate the complexities that go into making a cinematic quality CGI character. Take the graphics rendering capabilities of the best next gen console and multiply that by 1000. That is how powerful the machines are at ILM. I'd like to get some specs on how many polys or vertices it took to make up one character. The number must be staggering and mind-blowing. I can't wait to see the "making of" footage that is sure to be included in the DVD release.

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What ends up on the silver screen this week is something that for once actually looks silver, justifiably chrome. Bay even had to send back one of the few non-CGI scale models made for the film — a painted fiberglass Bumblebee made for a scene when the Autobot savior is tied to train tracks — because it didn't look real enough

 

bumblebee was tied to train tracks?

 

They probably said that as to not SPOIL anything

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great find hunter, cant wait till this hits blueray!!

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great find hunter, cant wait till this hits blueray!!

 

Blue ray?! Pft! HD-DVD baby!

 

 

:ducks:

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