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Initially the answer should be obvious - you only have to look at the movies. The big six (of those already released) would have to be:

Attack of the Clones
The Fellowship of the Ring
Final Fantasy
Dinosaur
Monsters Inc
The Phantom Menace

A handful of other movies would have CGI of comparable quantity (if not quality - The Mummy Returns springs to mind).

I remember reading that the first Toy Story required a total of 34 terabytes of rendering, but only one terabyte of storage. That makes it a TV commercial by today's standards. If Final Fantasy required 20 TB of storage and Dinosaur 45 TB, how much rendering does this translate to?

Sorry, I wasn't specific enough in my question. While it's obvious to pin down the movies with the greatest number of CGI scenes, I was wondering which ones required the most data to produce.

Well, Dinosaur was completely computer-generated, so it would require a lot of data to produce it. On the other hand, ATOC required human interaction with CGI characters and scenary, which is most likely more complicatd, so I pick AOTC.

Putting aside pure GCI movies, like Final Fantasy which was nothing but CGI.

Attack of the Clones is almost certainly on the top. The actors spent more time in front of blue screens then anything else, and all but I think one set had significant amounts of GCI background.

FOTR is likely on the low side. There was a lot of CGI in the dwarves tunnels, but most sceans had alot more real stuff then CGI.

And even the Two Towers with its 45 minute battle has a real 1/4 scale minature of the whole area as the bases for the CGI characters fighting.

Sothis wrote:Well, Dinosaur was completely computer-generated, so it would require a lot of data to produce it. On the other hand, ATOC required human interaction with CGI characters and scenary, which is most likely more complicatd, so I pick AOTC.

Actually, Dinosaur combined real locations with CGI dinosaurs. Occassionally they would insert digital grass that would bend realistically when the dinos trod on it.

Sea Skimmer wrote:And even the Two Towers with its 45 minute battle has a real 1/4 scale minature of the whole area as the bases for the CGI characters fighting.

Many parts of AOTC also had miniature backgrounds in them - the Geonosian arena was that way as was the walkway on Kenosis.

"45 minutes" Ahh Im going to have a hard on.

Final Fantasy was a better CGI movie to me than Dinosaurs, probably a lot more poor nerds and artists sitting behind PC screens than any other movie. I wonder why some other studio hasn't thought about making a massive sci fi war movie as Millions want to see them, and equal big $$$ if marketted right. I mean why hasn't any movies other than Star Wars givin us any damn spacebattles of which thousands want to see. Stupid money hungry idiots never think about making super Sci Fi movies: only make crappy action movies with cg as a back drop. What do you think would make more money Dinosaurs or 95% CG Sweet Space combat movie. That stupid Wing Comander movie was horrible the cartoon was far better, the director should have his testies scraped with 10 grit sandpaper. Starship Troopers kicked ass but they didn't have any space battles, they just get blown to hell in their horrible space ships.

FOTR is likely on the low side. There was a lot of CGI in the dwarves tunnels, but most sceans had alot more real stuff then CGI.

A lot of things were the result of simply using two sets (of different sizes.... one to make, say, Ian Holme small, and the other to make Ian McKellan big), and then splicing the two bits of footage together. You can see this in the opening when Gandalf first walks into Bilbo's hobbit hole... right at the entry, you can see that Gandalf was CGI-ed in, and later when the camera pans away and back, and he bumps his head on the lamp, that's when they've shifted to the smaller set.

A lot of the tricks they did in LOTR involved very little CGI, actually. I was impressed.

In AotC, they probably made the lice on Obi-Wan's beard CGI, but in terms of haveing the highestr percentage of CGI, lots of recent movies have all CGI. However, as said, people had to interact with CGI scenery.

And by the way, they use CGI to edit just about everything these days. In a few years, they could get some 93 year-old men to play the cast of "Sex in the City".