ILM’s computer graphics department created custom software to render the liquid metal T‑1000 in Terminator 2. The film required about 50 shots and took roughly six months to complete. At the start of production the CG team comprised 12‑15 artists; by the end it had expanded to approximately 300 personnel. Early work built on tools from The Abyss, including a monolithic program that generated the water pseudopod, which the team disassembled into separate utilities for T‑1000 effects. The team used Alias version 2.4.1 for modeling and animation, and RenderMan for shading. To achieve smooth morphing between the T‑1000’s liquid form and the human actor Robert Patrick, they developed a stitching tool called Body Sock that blended b‑spline patches each frame. A precursor to modern 3D paint, Make Sticky, allowed texture coordinates to remain fixed as geometry deformed. The MORF program, originally created for Willow, was adapted to handle shape‑shifting transitions such as the T‑1000’s head‑through‑bars and death‑sequence shots. Hardware constraints included expensive SGI workstations, with a gigabyte of storage costing about $9,000 in 1990, and limited CPU resources for overnight renders. The team wrote command‑line scripts and custom utilities, such as Z‑ripple for bullet‑hole healing and a processor allocator to manage CPU allocation. Motion blur was added in post‑production via optical compositing, as real‑time motion blur support was not available. The final T‑1000 shots were rendered at approximately 1 K resolution; scaling and printing were applied to meet theatrical requirements. ILM staff noted that the project pushed the limits of existing software and hardware, leading to the development of new tools that later influenced commercial VFX packages. The work demonstrated that hand‑crafted pipelines could produce effects that held up to modern standards.