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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."
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.)
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.
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
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).
Only somewhat true. Check out snopes for a more accurate (although less humourous) rendition and the true origins of this not quite urban legend.