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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."
The dead orc still looks up when steped on. The arrow counts are still way off. The size of the hobbits still keeps changing.
Of course it seems I'm a troll for even thinking that there could be anything wrong with these movies. (sigh)
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
It is wonderful to see open source in an integral role in a popular movie such as this. This is just the beginning of the mainstreaming of open source, hopefully.
Uh, what kind of monkey anticipates this battle? It's hardly ranks among the many battles in Return of the King. And at the end of the day there's plenty of similar stuff out there: braveheart, Ben Hur, yadda yadda yadda. Please spin down the hype reflex.
Actually one of the guys from Massive gave a talk at my lab and they had video of it. All the little dudes in back rows turned and ran away. Evidently their software agents couldn't see any of the enemy agents so they ran around trying to find some!
I think we're pretty close to this already. I remember watching the sept 11 planes hitting the towers and thinking it looked "fake" like a movie, simply because it was too incredible believe.
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We may witness the birth of Agent Smith's (of Matrix fame) Ancestors. Agents are nearly independent reactive creations, using Fuzzy Logic (not to be confused with Dubya's Fuzzy Numbers) to simulate reality... if the battle were a reality.
Particle Technology such as that used in the Charge of the Huns in Disney's "Mulan" is now yesterday's fishwrapping-newspaper software, worthy of MST3K review.
Do yourself a favor and go buy the 4 disc version of FoTR. Find a time when you have 7 hours to spare and watch the last two discs. Viggo is "an old school actor, a gentleman" as some of the others refer to him. This is a guy that takes his craft very, very seriously. That guy impressed the hell outta me, moreso even than Ian McKellan or Christopher Lee. And that's saying quite a lot. He's intelligent, soft-spoken, and cares about what he does. When's the last time you saw an actor like that?
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
Personally, I hated the book the first time I read it. Unlike The Hobbit, which is filled with action and adventure, the vast majority of Lord of the Rings consists of traveling to somewhere where something might happen, and having a sense of dread and foreboding about it. When I read it the second time, I knew that nothing was going to happen for long stretches of the book, so I was able to have greater patience with the whole thing, and get more out of it. Although I still found the endless talk of destiny and family trees and Elven racial superiority to be extremely tedious. (Incidentally, I'll be interested to see if the dark-complexioned evil men of Harad and their war elephants will show up in the next two movies.)
In the star wars episode 1 big battle, it looked like a bunch of CGI fighting more CGI. Granted part were robots, but they all looked robotic. I felt nothing, and it was due to the obvious cgi and actions.
... something I doubt any of the LOTR movies suffer from, but I digress. :-)
Did you feel anything in the opening sequence of the Fellowship of the Ring, at the battle where Isildur cut the ring from Sauron's hand? If so, that would confirm your evaluation of massive (at least for yourself), and would quite frankly agree with mine.
OTOH Star Wars I and II were without feeling for reasons having nothing to do with the quality of the computer animation and special effects, and everything to do with terrible writing, mediocre directing, and wooden delivery
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I have been playing a game called "Medieval: Total war" and IT has thousands of combatants bashing each other with swords, in real-time, on a "simple" P4 laptop. Even though the game (cleverly) uses sprites, and the TTT render uses every 3d trick in the book, when I saw the LOTR:TTT trailer, I was surprised how under-impressed I felt. It is amazing that modern games can even come close to "feeling" like these scenes rendered at great cost and time. The game has the thrill of interaction,sure, but still amazing how it stole the awe of the TTT trailer for me!! Anyone else feel the same?
BTW, I wonder how long before we are playing games that look as good as TTT render?
And don't forget that he was called in when they were already shooting. The original actor was cast "too young". Which if my calculations are correct, Aragorn is supposed to be at least in his 50s - going on the basis of the Story of Arwen and Aragorn (in the appendix). After being in NZ for two days he had to shoot Weathertop.
The originally cast actor (I refuse to name him - he appeared in Queen of the Damned if you must know) has said in an interview that Wellington is the arsehole of the world (No Karma for guessing where I am), but he says he's "not bitter."
For those who haven't bought/watched the appendencies of the extended version: after talking on the phone to PJ, he wasn't sure about whether to do it or not, but his son Henry said something like "OMG, they want you to be Aragorn, and you're thinking about it???". Henry was also responsible for checking that Thror Oakenshield's map is still around for Gandalf to look at.
Consultancy: If you're not part of the solution, there's money to be made in prolonging the problem
Actors of colour? I hardly think that a species where an entire gender is missing doesn't classify as being "of colour".
Or do you have something against the Ents?
But if you're being serious, there's Irish representation here. And the Irish are pretty colourful.
Consultancy: If you're not part of the solution, there's money to be made in prolonging the problem
Well i think you sumerised the feeling that the book was supposed to replay quite well. A large part of the book is about man's journey towards death .. "dread and foreboding"
It is also definatly true the book is very much about the characters development, and not the modern heroism that most current books seem to aspire to.
Is it just a coincidence that the biggest set of virtual humans in movie history is studied by a guy called Sims?
Anyone who has read Tolkien's works with half an eye open for cultural stereotypes was probably surprised at how much of the real world pops out in them.
It is important to understand that Tolkien was raised in a different culture, before racial equality (as opposed to simple racial tolerance) began to be accepted and widespread. I love his books as much as ever, and I can appreciate that he was writing using the cultural ideas of the time. It is not that he wished to be racist - but rather, he had learned that his readers would expect evil to be physically apparent in the form of dark skin and short stature.
Middle Earth is comprised of vast lands between the ever-shining light of the Uttermost West and the dark, lost lands of the East. Also, because the Elves travelled over the northern ice to reach Middle Earth, the areas to the south are also considered less enlightened.
The populations of the southern lands are described as 'swarthy' and untrustworthy, and the further east you go the shorter, darker, and less civilized the peoples of Middle Earth (also known as Europe) become. It takes little effort to realize that Numenor, from which the race of kings from which Aragorn is descended comes, is the Isle of Britain and that Eressea, the final stop before the Undying Lands, is Ireland.
In the Silmarillion, the world is bent from flat to spherical so that no mortal may ever sail the way to the divine lands again. So I'm not sure whether Valinor is America, or whether America is the easternmost land, furthest from the light and wisdom of the West.
-Elentar
The wheel it turns, around and around, with an ancient rumbling sound.
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.
And Olorin. You know, Gandalf. Gandalf was, in actuality a Maiar who wanted to remain after the Valar sealed themselves away. Not exactly a fallen Maiar, like Sauron or Balrogs. Make for odd family reunions though.
I will say that your grasp of the parts you mentioned is fairly cohesive, excluding the parts from the Quenta Silmarillion. The other 4 parts comprise around under 20% of the book "The Silmarillion."
The Quenta Silmarillion, in addition to the creation of the sun and moon, details the creation and awakening of the elves. It deals with one of the original (or second gen, can't remember now) elves, Feanor and his lust for power. He was the one that created the Silmarils (Silmarillion -- Silmarils, it's not actually coincidence). They were three jewels crafted by Feanor and they contained light from, effectively, the tree of life.
Morgoth entered a pact with Sheloeb's kin (not entirely clear if it is or isn't actually Sheloeb) to steal all the elves jewels and drain the tree of life. They were successful, and stole the Silmarils as well. The elves and the Valar could have used the Silmarils to restore the tree, had they been present.
The rest of the Silmarillion revolves around Feanor and his offspring having taken an oath to find the Silmarils and keep them, and to fight anyone who got in their way, including the Valar. They were outcast into Middle-Earth.
The story then goes through to be one of the more potent that Tolkien has written. It details the arrival of men and dwarves, the lives of the elves and their collective struggle against Morgoth.
It contains, among other things, the stories of Turin, Beren and Luthien, the final downfall of Morgoth, and the eventual loss of the Silmarils.
So, I'm really just expounding on what you said. But, it's a great book, and I really would recommend it.
This is why /. needs a special "6" score for certain posts. God damnit, that's fricking funniest thing I have ever seen!
After I stopped laughing at the parent post, I had to ask myself *when*, not *if*, this actually might be the way movie theaters work.
.WAD file. I can easily see the day when a photorealistic movie could be generated solely by the computer.
After all, if you can really generate a scene completely in software, it probably takes a LOT fewer bytes to describe it than the raw imagery. How big was the entire source material for Final Fantasy? I'd bet it was a LOT smaller than a fully-digital movie at full theater resolution.
Taken to its logical conclusion, I wonder how far away the day will be when a "movie" as delivered to the studio is actually merely the script, along with a bunch of texture files, character maps, landscape grids, MIDI files, etc., essentially a huge
To karma whore for a second, too, it's interesting to note that if the movie theater rendering system that drove this method were sufficiently more advanced than the average user's home PC, it would make it completely impossible to pirate a digital movie on a 1-for-1 basis - you'd only be able to capture the rendered film, and have a much larger digital file to handle. What a bonus for the movie industry that could be.
A final thought about this idea. Assuming that the hardware in each theater were not identical, and even if they were, it's entirely likely that each time the film were projected (hence rendered then projected), it would be slightly different. Hmmm.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
Well, that's the official line, yes. I believe in reality it had rather more to do with the original actor blowing up mailboxes in the neighborhood in Wellington he was staying in.
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yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah. It's better for everyone not to participate in any kind of "Tolkien was a racist" discussion, because most likely nothing fruitful will ever come from it. =)
I don't remember enough of Tolkien maps, and may be not knowing anything, so thwack me, but wasn't there a land mass east of that of Middle-Earth? Not well described, and that would have been the Americas. I was always thinking of Valinor as a third big land mass with no modern counterpart whatsoever.
this was the best map I could find?