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Article about The Lord of the Rings MASSIVE Crowd

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the one-hour-extra-footage-out-next-week dept.

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".

5 of 289 comments (clear)

  1. Off topic but of interest to the LOTR crowd... by jerkychew · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Purchase some of the servers used to render the CGI in the first LOTR movie here.

    Own a geeky piece of history!

  2. Fuzzy logic by mesozoic · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The article mentions that in order to support such a complicated undertaking -- each character has anywhere from 100 to 8000 behavioral logic nodes to govern its behavior -- the creators of Massive used fuzzy logic to make their creations act.

    As far as I understand, fuzzy logic -- using probabilities instead of binary values -- has been given the shaft in most of the computing world. People can't wrap their heads around a concept that's termed 'fuzzy', no matter how solid the mathematics behind it are. Maybe this sort of accomplishment will open new doors for research involving fuzzy logic in computing systems.

    1. Re:Fuzzy logic by jdbo · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I agree - this is a real accomplishment in terms of pioneering a new development methodologies, esp. considering how geared the typical CS mindset is completely focused on absolutely predictable results.

      I enjoy reading up on (some branches) of AI, and the most interesting advances (IMHO) in the last few years have been coming from the specific application end, i.e. video games and this... on the pure research end I'm still most interested in the work done by Douglas Hofstdater at U Indiana, but the work being done for games and movies really digs into on the important, but unsexy issues like "how the hell do we actually work with this stuff to get stuff done??". Sure, they've got a conceptually simple goal (make crowds fight!), but this is a case where the devil is in the details, but there are a billion details and the details are all that matters.

      Anyway, it's great to see that they've made strides in making this sort of non-deterministic (kinda-misapplied-term) functionality usable by normal humans.

      Besides, I'm freaking out at the idea of seeing 10,000 orcs (and the article mentions that there will be 100,000 fighters in one of the ROTK battles - yeep!)

  3. Re:PJ's Version Is Disappointing by Oculus+Habent · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It did leave a good bit out, but you can't expect anyone but true fanatics to sit through 6 hours per movie to ensure every bit was included. The additions/adaptations for Arwen's character are understandable. I don't really miss Tom Bombadil, though. He was a fun character, but he didn't have anything to do with the story. Ultimately, he was a sidetrack, a lead-in to a book that was never written.

    I know I'll catch a lot of flak for this, but here goes:

    I really enjoyed the books, and would not even begin to compare a movie to them for the wholeness and the granularity of the story. Even so, the book offers unfair advantages. Tolkien can say "his eyes flashed" and you make it happen, which is why turning a popular work into a movie is so difficult. Peter James does a great job with the material. I particularly can't wait to see the Ents, as I would like to see a tree that wasn't a tree.

    Moving into the dangerous ground, Tolkien wrote some great work, but his books require great imagination to fill in the holes. Tolkien's time scale was never very concise(on the mountain, turn around, in the mine...) and the spaces in his book sometimes leave you wanting for some accounting (Frodo suddently ages twenty-seven years without any significant events?)

    Don't get me wrong; I love the books, and the story. So don't shoot me.

    --
    That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
  4. Re:Create your own crowds by Animats · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I think that's the old Motion Factory engine, which is a cute little system that wasn't very succesful as a game engine. Control is exercised with state machines with rule-based transitions. Some of the Stanford robotics people did it as a startup in the early 1990s. Motion Factory was used for Prince of Persia 3D, and never heard from again. Softimage (actually Avid, which now owns Softimage) bought up the company, and their CEO took over Softimage, a somewhat wierd result.

    $15K, though. Avid uses the Macho Pricing Model: if it's expensive, it must be Professional. Avid really bought Softimage from Microsoft because Softimage was coming out with Digital Studio, a compositing package which threatened Avid's overpriced compositing systems. Avid never really seemed to want the 3D business. There was a big exodus from Softimage when Microsoft sold them off. Softimage XSI came out years late, and meanwhile, the industry mostly switched to Maya, which is $2K for the base package (and free for a version that stamps giant logos on everything).

    Actually, the first really good crowd behavior engine used in a major motion picture drove the baby 'zillas in Godzilla. Unfortunately, the company that did that job went under shortly thereafter.