It does, most notably perhaps for things like the Ents and large parts of the battle in RoTK (e.g. Army of the Dead, Oliphaunts). It just did so much practically that it's one of those films where it might be a bit difficult to delineate if you aren't looking closely, similar to films like Fury Road.

Andy Serkis was great, but not as good at shape-shifting. For LOTR renderfarm WETA bought a bunch of SGI 1200 dual core Pentium III 700MHz servers with 1GB RAM, 9 GB SCSI disks all running RedHat Linux. I've read at some point they had 192 SGI 1100 and 1200 servers working.

It’s mind blowing that you can rent one VM in the cloud with the same spec.

Here’s an example with nearly one kilocores: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/siz...

Gollum? The Balrog?

Pre-CGI it looked like this: https://www.galaxus.de/im/Files/1/8/4/9/5/2/0/9/gollum_serki...

It does, absolutely everywhere? Down to fully CGI characters like Gollum.

It didn't use anywhere near as much as the hobbit, but lots of things are enhanced. I have a similar problem with Avengers/Marvel which just doesn't look great to me. Avatar did look very good though. The main problem I have with CGI is if the story isn't there, which for me is definitely the case with most Avengers movies which are just a mess.

the actor that played gandalf ian mckellen? had a minor breakdown on set after he was made to stand on a greenscreen for multiple days.

That was on the set of The Hobbit, not LOTR, which used far less CGI