2009 CGI was NOT supposed to look this insane

Me when I watched this scene in theaters for the first time as a kid

That moment i knew i fell in love with TRANSFORMERS forever also with Megan fox

Pretty sure Devastator was the most complicated and had the most polygons of any CGI character for the time And it looks absolutely amazing

I'm still amazed by the vfx work, insane work

I expected CGI to get progressively better It has, but I've since learned it takes a LOT of very talented people to pull it off

This scene crashed the computers while they were creating Devastator

yeah, heard that they were on fire

that year is peak of human as an cgi artist, real artists pour dedication to cgi. artist nowdays getting easier by Ai and auto generate tools that limit their OWN creativity, they so proud of lifeless abomination "Ai is the future" bullshit! this is proof art is moving backward

They need to ban AI and hire real humans who can actually recreate work like in 2010's

Best part

Literally balls of steal

It's awesome that it holds up and looks better than a lot of other CGI today.

yes

Fun fact the computers were on fire because of Devastator.

i mean how freakin' insane is that😭

Incorrect. 2009 CGI looking that good should have meant that modern day CGI would be orders of magnitude better.

Fun fact: the Devastator model from Revenge of the Fallen made a computer explode. The keyboard was covered in soot.

this still looks incredible because the animation sells mass. rigid body physics, delayed mechanical secondary motion, parts reacting after the main movement, nothing feels weightless and you can feel every thump. pacific rim too does the same thing.

People dunk on ROTF but Devastator is still one of the craziest assets ever built. 11.7 million polys in 2009. That thing was melting workstations while looking like it could eat a pyramid.

They don't make movies like this anymore

We went from this to dr strangers 3rd eye looking like a slap on bumper sticker 🫩

This was 2009 🤯

The CGI in 2009 is peak🔥

😂 2009 CGI had absolutely no business going this hard. The fact that Avatar came out that same year makes this even crazier. Hollywood was really operating on “either revolutionize visual effects or melt the render farm trying.” 💀 And the dust, lighting, reflections, and destruction in this shot still hold up surprisingly well.

Why are people from nowadays acting like back then type work is impossible. They just don’t have 2009 talent

This looks like shit. All of the transformations looked like shit. Just a messy impossible blur of pixels moving around. Devastator looks like early AI video. The idea of the object doing something but the second you really look at it it's just diarrhea. There's no consistency or form to it it's just movement for the sake of movement. And the end result is just trash.

Art needs time

This shit actually fried a lot of the motherboards in Industrial Light & Magic, they were supposed to do more scenes with Devastator but as mentioned earlier, they literally couldn't.

well devastator did devastate many of the animators computers

That’s not Devastator. This is Devastator

This scene was around the second or third time I almost walked out of the theater. The first was the tongue...

I never understood the complaints that the robots looked fake and that you couldn't tell what was going on. These movies look better than most recent stuff, and I could always follow the action.

Industrial Light & Magic did this on Xeons. I don't recall if they were 5500 or x5500's, but Devastator was 52K+ pieces and 11M+ polys. This didn't get put in check until one machine came close on the poly count.... For gooner reference 2B's Cake was over 2k polys. I know she doesn't compare, but now I feel cheated. Can ILM give us a 30 second render of 2b shaking her thing for comparison. I promise this is purely for science. Now on a side note SE made the tech demo Agni's Philosophy which could push 10 M polys per scene total - and I hope I'm recalling this correctly, but they needed 4 titan X's in SLI for a consistent 60 FPS vs ILM's 24 fps. That was 4 year gap in tech when shown, not made. Another fair comparison is the Las Vegas Sphere could do a theoretical max of ~7.3B polygons, if public stats are right, and maintain 60 FPS. Suddenly I want to see Devastator and 2B dance on the sphere with upgraded models - AGAIN wanted for purely scientific reasoning.

Could be that it's just been a while since I've seen the movie, but I remember there being less saturation of color. That or just gotten used to seeing CGI the older stuff pops out.

Transformers 2 was nominated for best sound but not best visual effects. That category was originally for 3 nominees until it increased to 5 the following year.

@MotherlyZeeb Now we understand why George Lucas was so obsessed with CGI

Damn this is gonna make me wanna watch all the movies again.

They say Zahi Hawass the famous Egyptologist was hospitalized after seeing that scene 😅

What dumbass went out of their way to edit this scene and have it change aspect ratio every shot? The original scene isn’t like that and it’s so jarring that I thought this had been AI enhanced or something.