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Massive Two Towers Battle
ShadowLight writes ""In December vast hordes of eager filmgoers will mob cineplexes across the land and witness, at the climax of The Two Towers, one of the most anticipated scenes in recent movie history: the great Battle of Helm's Deep." This article talks about the software, named Massive, used to create this 50,000 creature battle."
I think this must have happened while editing for length was going on. The extended release is much more coherent.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
You've heard an exaggeration from the previous SlashDot article.
In another early simulation, Jackson and Regelous watched as several thousand characters fought like hell while, in the background, a small contingent of combatants seemed to think better of it and ran away. They weren't programmed to do this. It just happened. 'It was spooky.' Jackson said in an interview last year.
The Two Towers Visual Companion, a movie tie-in, features a nice four-page foldout illustrating the battle's progress. (N.B. The book's foreword, by Viggo Mortensen (who played Aragorn), is worth a read. Maybe I'm a bigot, but I hadn't expected an actor's commentary to be so perceptive and nuanced.)
FYI:
This is the list of all the known inconsistencies in FotR. Some of them are actually quite simple and some are rather amusing.
If you can't beat them, arrange to have them beaten. -George Carlin
It's like in Saving Private Ryan when the medic gets shot in the kidney and starts spurting strawberry syrup, when anyone who's looked into human anatomy could have told them what a kidney wound should look like. They just about killed what should have been a very good scene by not buying a .25$ thing of brown food coloring.
Uh... the kidneys are positively packed full of arterial blood. When wounded in the kidney, one does, for all practical purposes, spew strawberry syrup. Arterial blood is a bright, almost improbable, red. Like stop-sign red, or fire-engine red.
Girlfriend's a surgical resident. She brings home snapshots of her operations on the digital camera. When she did a trauma surgery rotation, one of the injuries she had to treat was a kidney lac. Strawberry syrup was everywhere.
I write in my journal
okay, lesse,
Citizen Cain,
Thelma & Louis,
Crying Game
Titanic
The sixth sense
This game is GREAT!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Sorry, but I think they've got a ways to go, and I'm really interested to see what these movies can do to raise the bar.
My bad, the wound was to the liver, not the kidney. From what I've read and seen it should have been dark, almost black.
You read wrong. Liver lacs are just like kidney lacs; they positively spew arterial blood, because of the dense vascularization of the organ. Now the liver produces bile, but it doesn't actually contain bile. Bile is held in the gall bladder, but only a very small quantity of it. And it's a pale, translucent green, not black at all.
If you have a bowel perforation, it's possible for fecal matter to leak out into the belly, and from the belly out through an open wound or incision. But that's kinda... well, it looks kinda like tiny nuggets of mud embedded in blood or bile. It's not really black, either.
Realistic depictions of serious injuries are really not that interesting to look at; everything is one color, the bright red of arterial blood, and one texture, the texture of raw meat.
I write in my journal
Look up info on Fuzzy expert systems.
In general a fuzzy expert system has a slew of if-then rules.
Each If-then rule has a condition that is expressed as a fuzzy membership function, and a consequent that is expressed as a fuzzy membership function.
All the if-then rules are applied "in parallel" to produce a set of fuzzy output sets. These fuzzy output sets are combined in a process called defuzzification (there are many algorithms for this) to produce a definite action (ie. move forward).
The very cool thing about fuzzy rules is that they are generally expressed in terms of linguistic statements that make sense, as in
"if attacked then fight_back" and
"if attacked_heavily then retreat".
attacked, fight_back, attacked_heavily, and retreat are all "fuzzy sets" (usually represented as arrays).
((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) http://www.endpointcomputing.com a scientific approach to custom computing.
Here is an interesting article which addresses some of WETA's other issues in creating the film, and talks a little about their uses of Linux as their core OS.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d Capitalization really works: i helped my uncle jack off a horse
It runs on Irix and Massive is being ported to Linux. Quote: From the beginning of preproduction, Weta Digital has also used the IRIX OS-based Octane visual workstations to write extensions to Maya and create proprietary technology. This technology includes Massive, a custom-built crowd animation or "artificial ecology" system developed on IRIX and now ported to Linux that draws from a huge database of motion-capture data. (see here).
Where's the mod for "Hook, Line, and Sinker"?
Consultancy: If you're not part of the solution, there's money to be made in prolonging the problem
The actual quote is:
"Strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
Only somewhat true. Check out snopes for a more accurate (although less humourous) rendition and the true origins of this not quite urban legend.
Actually, there is a plot. There are five parts.
Ainulindale, the music of the Ainur. It began with Eru, the One, whom the Elves call Iluvatar. His thoughts became the Ainur, the most mighty of whom were called the Valar (the others were Maiar). As Iluvatar created and shaped Arda, the world, Melkor, mightiest of the Valar, tried to shape the world in his image, to achieve dominance. He rebelled against Iluvatar and was from then on known as Morgoth.
Valaquenta. Mostly an enumeration of the fourteen Valar (after his fall, Melkor was not counted among them), and the most important of the Maiar, such as Sauron and the Balrogs.
Quenta Silmarillion. Something about two lamps being destroyed by Morgoth and the Sun and Moon being created to replace them. The First Age starts with the creation of the Sun and ends with Morgoth's final defeat by the Valar. There's some stuff about Silmarils in there, too.
Akallabeth. As a reward for their service to the Valar, the men who fought with them (the Dunedain, "men of the west") were given a great island which they called Numenor. They built a great empire, but were deceived by Sauron, who told them that if they defeated the Valar and took possession of their forbidden land, Valinor, that they too would become immortal. The last king of Numenor, Ar-Pharazon, tried this, and the Valar called upon Iluvatar to reshape the world. Numenor sunk into the sea (though a few escaped), and Valinor was removed from the plane of the world.
Of The Rings of Power and the Third Age. Sauron forges the twenty rings of power. The Last Alliance of men and elves defeats him, ending the Second Age. Isildur refuses to destroy the ring; he is killed by the orcs and it is lost. It passes to Gollum, and that's where LOTR begins.
This is from a quick skimming of The Encyclopedia of Arda. See, when "Gil-galad" or "Morgoth" are mentioned, I can look them up and find out what the heck he's talking about.
If someone has actually read the Silmarillion, feel free to correct me. I'm leaving out quite a bit and possible screwing other stuff up. (For instance, the dwarves were first-created after the Ainur, but the elves awoke first.)
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Yes, but you're missing the point. It was _the_ first movie to use computers in a very direct and visible way. The first time you saw a character "glow" was the very first combination of live action and computer animation in a seamless (more or less) way.
Truly revolutionary. Sorta like the first guy to combine peanuts and beer.
--Kevin
Geographically, what you're describing is the location of the second evil of Middle Earth, Sauron. The first evil, Morgoth, made his home much farther north and rather west of Mordor. Those southern and eastern landmarks for evil were only found in the second wave, not the first.