Its that time of year again for Minnesota's creative people to gather at the Minnesota Electronic Theater (MET) hosted by MN SIGRAPH.  Doug Sutton from ILM talked about Transformers 2.  We took a look at the Devastator model, which essentiall equaled five large models and combined to form the largest and heaviest model ILM has ever produced.   It is quite an impressive feate of animation mixed with the technical backbone of riging, dynamics and rendering.  I heard Doug talk at the MET a few years ago when he talked about the release of the first Transformers movie and this presentation was equally impressive and it was great to hear him speak again.

One insightful fact that Doug shared with us to show just how processor intensive Transformers 2 was, if you rendered the entire film on a modern PC, it would take 16,000 years to complete!  Thats a lot of computing power ILM had to complete their film in about a year and half.  The begging question is, how many computers did they they have?   Here is a link to other fun facts.  Its quite amazing what studios like ILM can produce with their vast amounts of resources.  His presentation also showed just how much of a team effort was required between the technical and creative staff to pull off some of their shots.  While its the artistry people see on screen, in many cases it requires quite a bit of technical support coming from rigs develoment, dynamics and rendering. 

The event continued with the presentation of the MET 2009 Show Reel.  The best professional short was won by MAKE for the quite humorus and well developed story titled Envirometer.  Great job guys!