Roland Emmerich’s latest disaster porn film, 2012, comes to theaters soon, and features some amazing visual effects that destroy the planet over the 158 minute feature. The scale of the effects is massive, and in a new article on PCAuthority we get some details into just how much data they had to manage.
“A building has to be cut apart into millions of little pieces, so then a physics-based simulation can be done on that building and shows how a building would crumble when the ground would move under it,” says effects supervisor Volker Engel.
There was over a petabyte (1 million gigabytes) of information going to disk. So big were some of the destruction sequences, that a render farm consisting of 250 computers was set up to handle two of the major effects scenes – particularly the destruction of Vegas sequence.
