Article about The Lord of the Rings MASSIVE Crowd

TheOneRing.net has posted an article going indepth about LotR CGI, and specifically the rendering of extremely large crowds being done byWETA Digital. With the special edition due out soon, and TTT coming out in december, well let's just leave it at "Yay".

Comments

Create your own crowds

[malducin]

For those interested, you can purchase Massive. Stephen Regelous, the brains behind this app, showed it last SIGGRAPH. You can check their website here:

Massive Software

Softimage also just announced their own system:

SOFTIMAGE ANNOUNCES SOFTIMAGE®|BEHAVIOR

Re:The advertising is wrong re: the two towers any

[jdbo]

Actually, you're half right; Tolkien's British publisher insisted on breaking up his 6 "book", 1 volume work into 3 smaller volumes of 2 books each (due to a paper shortage), which compelled Tolkien to come up with new titles (as the original 6 "book" titles didn't apply broadly enough to the new groupings - TTT was originally "The Treason of Isengard" and "The Ring Goes South", IIRC).

In his letters Tolkien discusses his dissatisfaction with the title (though he came up with it), and vacillates as to exactly which two towers are referred to (!). Other towers he referrs to include Minas Morgul, and even Minas Tirith (although IMHO the last would only really be approp. for ROTK). I believe that Minas Morgul itself is described as having two towers on either side of its gates as well...

Anyway, I'm happy with it being ambiguous - but as far as the promos go, it makes sense to "nail this down" to shut down the ridiculous WTC connections.

And yes, you are correct, I don't have a girlfriend. ;)

Lord of Jurassic Park

[DAPence]

Yes, the software used in "The Lord of the Rings : The Two Towers" to produce the massive Orc armies at Helm's Deep is based on that used for the Jurassic Park movies. The cool thing about the Weta software, is that each 'Orc' has a small about of A.I. behind it, which will supposedly give the effects a more life-like appearance. DAPence Webmaster, THELORDOFTHERINGS.com

Any of the Four Towers are correct.

[Dai_Quat]

Here's the history behind the Four Towers. Any two will do: http://members.cts.com/king/e/erikt/tolkien/2tower s.htm This link explains that Tolkien changed his mind about that a few times. Really, the name was rather forced on him, for a volume that he didn't want released in that manner anyway. Book 3 and Book 4 of Tolkien's six-book epic became "The Two Towers." Tolkien himself drew three different covers for the book, one showing Minas Tirith and Barad-dur, and the second and third showing Minas Morgul and Orthanc. So you might as well call it The Four Towers, as Tolkien changed his mind about which two the title refers to. Here's a Tolkien quote that shows that for awhile at least, the Two Towers the movie refers to were possiblities left deliberatly vague. "The Two Towers gets as near as possible to finding a title to cover the widely divergent Books 3 & 4; and can be left ambiguous- it might refer to Isengard and Barad-dur, or to Minas Tirith and B; or Isengard and Cirith Ungol (1)." [Letter #140] -J.R.R. Tolkien Later Tolkien did settle on Cirith Ungol and Orthanc, because of the text of books 3 and 4, but conceded that Barad-dur and Minas Tirith, seemed less confusing. I think, as long as it's any two of the four, you can't go far wrong. I can see easily how Jackson's choice of Barad-dur and Orthanc makes a great match. "There is now an alliance between the Tower of Orthanc and the Tower of Barad-dur." It spells out, in a simple sentence, the power of the threat to Middle-Earth. Wait a second. I just posted a Lord of the Rings factoid on Slashdot! Coal to Newcastle! You guys probably knew this when you were in Kindergarden!

Re:Fuzzy logic

[nathanh]

Fuzzy logic is not the same thing as probabilities. You and the original poster are both confused.

Fuzzy logic assigns a proportion of truth (between 0 and 1) to each fuzzy logic value. A proportion of truth is not the same thing as a probability. A probability assigns a value to the chance of a particular outcome for an as-yet-unknown event. Fuzzy logic assigns a value - the proportion of truth - to already known data. The difference is not even subtle or semantic: it's a huge difference.

I'll try to explain this better. In boolean logic a statement is either false (0) or true (1). In fuzzy logic the truth of a statement is any value between 0 and 1 inclusive. So for example you might have a value OLD with a baby being 0 and a pensioner being 1 and a linear slope between those two extremes. You don't have to choose a linear slope, of course.

Once you have the truth of a statement as a number you can use logic tables. So NOT(x) equals 1-x, OR(x,y) = maximum(x, y), and AND(x,y) = minimum(x,y). So the statement

cool car = (sports OR red) AND NOT (suv)

Is equivalent to

cool car = minimum(maximum(sports, red), 1 - suv)

You then convert raw data for a given car into truth values and pass it through the fuzzy logic statement to determine the truth value of a complicated concept like "cool car". A pink station wagon would have (sports,red,suv) values of (0.0, 0.5, 0.0). A green Ford Explorer with an Type-R sticker would have values of (0.2, 0.0, 0.9).

So to take this example further, a Ford Explorer would rate highly on the suv value, so 1 - suv would be low and the minimum(..., 1-suv) statement would drive cool car towards zero. Imagine that cool car was 0.1 after doing the calculations. What that value means is that the truth value of the statement "The Ford Explorer Is a Cool Car" is 0.1... which is not very true.

Notice how this isn't a probability! If that value of 0.1 was a probability then it would mean that every 10th Ford Explorer is cool while the other 9 Ford Explorers are not cool. Clearly that's nonsense. Ford Explorers are all equally uncool. I hope this example makes it clear that Fuzzy Logic is not the same thing as probabilities.