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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 way I heard that the AI for the battle scene was programmed was such that every one of the creatures had a slightly different set of paramaters, with the same goal of maximizing damage, while minimizing casualties.
On the first run, every single one of the thousands of little AIs decided that the best way to minimize casualties was to turn and run away.
Common sense is what tells you the world is flat.
And the coolest thing about it is that I did it 3 years ago when I actually read the book.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
This is sure to be a big box office draw, but 50,000 scantily-clad beach bimbo babes might do even better at the box office!
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
I hope they have some interesting features on the Two Towers DVD(s) related to MASSIVE. There was a bit on the Special Edition DVD of the Fellowship of the Ring, but not as much as I would've liked.
In Return of the King, the final film in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the climactic battle--yes, the Battle of Helm's Deep is just a run-up--is rumored to employ more than 100,000 characters.
Oh Hell Yes.
I can't be the only geek with a hard-on here can I?
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.
The "Two Towers." Now a software program called "Massive." No trend here.
My Vorpal Sword is bigger than yours.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
Just after the four Hobbits get past the watchman in Bree, on their way to the Pracing Pony, Peter Jackson appears on the right hand side of the screen, and announces his presence with a lovely belch.
Dan Koeppel, a film-school dropout, has written for Wired and The New York Times Magazine. Although a longtime Tolkien reader, he draws the line at The Silmarillion.
Wuss.
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
This is a good thing. The last Star Wars finially convinced me that Lucas is a POS because I wasn't distracted by his "special effects."
Hopefully effects will now be more relevant to the story if we are taking cgi for granted.
My guess is TTT can hold it's own without the gee whiz cgi.
The dead orc still looks up when steped on.
Who says he's dead? He's just disabled and bleeding to death.
The arrow counts are still way off.
If you're talking about what I think you're talking about, even the book says that Legolas picked up orc and goblin arrows along the way. Besides, if you sat through the movie counting the arrows, I think it's possible that you might have missed the point.
The size of the hobbits still keeps changing.
Yeah, and in episode 2F09, when Itchy plays Scratchy's skeleton like a xylophone, he strikes the same rib twice in succession, yet he produces two clearly different tones. I mean, what are we to believe, that this is some sort of a (heh heh) magic xylophone or something? Boy, I really hope somebody got fired for that blunder.
Of course it seems I'm a troll for even thinking that there could be anything wrong with these movies.
Hee hee. I get it! Lord of the Rings! Troll! Brilliant!
(-1, Hobbit)
I write in my journal
Ok, to get it out of the way before someone else does; ;-p
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these
but besides that point, on the second page, about half way down, they talk about how nobody really knew what was going to happen when "orc met elf" par say, so they just let it randomly play out. Friggin neat IMHO. So in theory, they could throw extra renders on of different battles for special edition dvds and such.... Imagine the posibilities (while you imagine a beowulf cluster of these).
Saitoh
We don't need an "overrated" so much as we need a "you completely missed the parent's point, dumbass..."
In a momentous surge of self-denial, Timothy was able to restrain himself for a full 20 days before posting a repeat story about The Two Towers. Slashdot readers, rejoice!
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
How about a new category? "Movie SPOILERS". That way, I can filter out articles on it, so I don't have to accidentally read about "the most anticipated scene" in a movie that's not out yet, just in case I've been working very hard to NOT see anything about the movie, so that I can fully enjoy it when it finally DOES come out?
Damnit.
Oh by the way:
It's a sled.
They drive off the cliff.
It's a guy.
Rose lives, Jack dies.
He's dead.
Education is the silver bullet.
I cringed during the CGI sequences of "Attack of the Clones." I really liked Lord of the Rings. Please let this new scene be a breakthrough and not an embarrasing distraction.
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.)
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.
Someone you trust is one of us.
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
Yeah, and in episode 2F09, when Itchy plays Scratchy's skeleton like a xylophone, he strikes the same rib twice in succession, yet he produces two clearly different tones. I mean, what are we to believe, that this is some sort of a (heh heh) magic xylophone or something? Boy, I really hope somebody got fired for that blunder.
I'll field that one. Let me ask you a question. Why would a man whose shirt says "Genius at Work" spend all of his time watching a children's cartoon show?
and up you one with...
Now I'm not necessarily an-an aficionado necessarily of 'Lord of the Rings' but the elvish that was spoken at Imladris between Aragorn and Arwen Undomiel, the Evenstar of her people...?
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
This kind of reminds me of the middle-school "proms" we would have at graduation.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
Moviemaking at the scale of The Two Towers is unlikely to ever be mainstream.
There is much pleasure to be gained in useless knowledge.
RUNAWAY!!
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.
Sounds like Massive may do it right, assuming the graphics and actions are both believable. This sounds to be quite promising!
<HUMOR>
We still need to get Jackson to rename the movie, because he's obviously trying to cash in on 9/11!
</HUMOR>
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
A 50,000 character particle system would run slower than Doom III!!!
This Massive stuff will be slow on the fastest next-generation movie theater accelerators even with tons of memory.
When the credits are rolling, the frame rates might be okay, but in the battle scene I bet they drop to around 24fps.
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.
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.
I think most people saw it and thought the same thing. I know when I saw it I thought of Die Hard for some reason right away. It was amazing.
As time has passed I still fire up the video clips and am amazed that Hollywood has come so far. So far in that they could duplicate an effect like that without injuring anyone.
And right there is the point. We've become so enamored with what movies can do and bring us that we're to the point where it does mimic real life. If you extrapolate that out to the fantasy environment we're seeing things that man hasn't seen in a long time or ever.
For instance think of the work on Jurassic Park. We weren't around when the dinos were, but we have the best look at what they might have moved like. Amazing.
I can't wait for the next generation of effects.
Who needs Star Wars, real geeks know what they love! And it's not Luca, let me tell you!
My name is Lucas.. I created Episode 4. I live upstairs from you. I think you worshipped me before.
When the guy has three arrows left and he shots five times, I cry foul.
Cry all you like. The underlying point of my previous post was that movies (and, by the same token, Itchy and Scratchy) are meant to be enjoyed. They're positively riddled with continuity errors as a result of the way they're made. So what?
Here, just to really get you excited, I'll throw you a couple of bones. During Boromir's death scene, his right hand appears and disappears from Aragorn's left shoulder about a million times. Or how about the magic disappearing pony? Or the way Merry and Pippin keep changing places during the scene in the inn?
None of these things detracts from the story, friend. Not a one of them. They're not important, they're not insightful; hell, they're not even really mistakes as much as they are harmless side-effects of the movie-making process.
Oh, and whatever you do, stay away from the climactic scene of Return of the Jedi. The smudges on Vader's helmet will no doubt send you into a fit of apoplexy.
I write in my journal
Forget your piddly 100K of Orcs. I can't wait to see the CGI scene showing that horde charging the theatres!!
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
RTFA. Massive isn't open-source and their is no mention of what hardware they used either.
The software is running on a cluster of GNU/Linux boxes. That is what he is likely referring to, and while this article may make no reference to the operating system, device drivers, libraries, and compilers used both to compile Massive itself, and to support the cluster upon which its renders run, it is well documented in any number of places, findable by google, and such common knowledge by most who read slashdot that he probably didn't feel the need to elucidate further.
The growth of GNU/Linux in Hollywood, the financial industry (in which I work), and any number of other areas of serious computational endeavor is indeed a very big victory for free software and open source, and a glaring black eye for the likes of Microsoft. One of free software's strongest advantages is the way it facilitates rapid development, maintenance, and long term stability of in-house software (by avoiding things like coerced upgrades, arbitrarilly moving API targets, shoddy infrastructure, poor security, and other such costly and detrimental things that Microsoft & Co. are so well known for).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
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
At only $50 it is a steal.
Available for Mac OS X, Win32 and Linux.
AA Batteries and Beowulf Cluster not provided.
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.
I found it rather amusing that one of the quotes from this story says, "...keep an eye out for a background character in The Two Towers who, in the middle of the battle, seems to take a call on his cellphone."
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
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
The real question is, Where's Waldo?
Girlfriend's a surgical resident. She brings home snapshots of her operations on the digital camera.
Sounds cozy. Do you watch them in front of an open fire drinking wine?
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?
my friends,
This is my last post of slashdot. After seeing this, I have decided that life is not worth living. I loved Star Trek and Tolkien and then this happened.
Doing the real ctrl-alt-del,
nbfn
This is a real site...
not goat stuff
I agree with you, I used the same package somewhere in between you two, and my son used it two years ago. Same results every time.
I heard the problem they are having is that the new versions of their software does not run with the present hardware. They hope the Coming Singularity will solve the problem and allow the new version to be launched.
I guess I need to reread it, but I always imagined the battles (both at Helms Deep and at Minas Tirith) as being a lot smaller than this. Anyone recall if JRRT actually mentioned numbers?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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).
Oh my GOD. I am going to die. I cannot breathe. I am laughing so hard, tears are rolling down my face.
/. at work.
Thank you for posting this.
I really need to stop reading
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d Capitalization really works: i helped my uncle jack off a horse
Don't people ever learn? How many more people have to die before we stop using our cell phones during battle?
If memory serves, OSDN made them drop "We're smarter than you. Suck it" when they bought the whole thing. But if you Google for it you may find an older version of the FAQ stating that the whole point of the site is to lash out and prove your intellectual superiority.
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
Please, please, please, let's have a new category for LOTR so that those of us who don't give a rat's ass about it can never see it.
Please, oh please oh please already!
And okay, yes, make a special category for me so you don't have to see my posts. Hardy har har, I beat you to it this time.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yeah, but by the time my turn comes around on the XDCC list and I finish receiving it at 1.05 kilobytes per second, the DVD will be out, ordered, delivered, and playing on my television.
Wouldn't that only be -1/2? :)
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Is it just a coincidence that the biggest set of virtual humans in movie history is studied by a guy called Sims?
Maybe in a few years when the Sims Online has run it's course, they can integrate the "Massive" program and have a huge battle at the end.
I would pay to see that.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
(Nicked from http://www.brunching.com/fuzzylogic.html)
whatever
whatever LISTThis function returns one of the nine neo-boolean values used in fuzzy logic: true, false, maybe, sure, what, whoa, depends, look-let's-talk-about-this-later-when-we're-not-in -public, and elbows.
The value returned is determined by standard anti-random vacillation
routines.
reconsider
reconsider EXPRThis causes the program to evaluate an expression until such time as it feels reasonably sure of its conclusion. Depending on the system and expression, this may take a fraction of a second or an entire freshman semester.
while holdon
while (EXPR) BLOCK holdon (EXPR) BLOCKThis works like a standard while loop at first, but at some point the function realizes it's been bringing personal issues into the evaluation in an inappropriate manner and begins to evaluate the expression named by holdon instead in an attempt to appear reasonable.
goaway
goaway LABELThis causes the program to execute starting at LABEL, while making it clear to the program that you could care less whether it ever returned to the present execution point or not. Calling the apology function later may cause the program to return to the statement directly after the goaway, but it may also cause the program to exit entirely, depending on how much you've been taking it for granted. Use of this function has been generally deprecated since the publication of the landmark essay "'GOAWAY' Considered Thoughtless."
pile
pile LISTThis function takes a LIST and sorts it until the function realizes there are too many items in the "miscellaneous" category and tries to figure out a better sorting scheme, then gets bored and leaves a big pile of unsorted items at the end. Returns a semi-sorted list with a big pile of unsorted items at the end.
grudge
grudge VARIABLEThe grudge function causes a program to develop an immediate dislike of the named variable, causing many operations involving that variable to return false for no apparent reason.
pedestal
pedestal VARIABLEThis causes the program to attach unhealthy significance to VARIABLE. The program will consider the named variable to be a microcosm of its own existence and will fall into a deep depression if the variable is undefined, ignored, or treated poorly. Both grudge and pedestal can be used on the same variable, causing the program to develop a love-hate relationship with the variable in question. This can be fun.
skim
skim FILEHANDLEThis function quickly looks over the data contained in FILEHANDLE, trying to get the gist of it and looking for any dirty bits or clever quotations it can use at parties to impress people.
oblique
oblique PLAINTEXT, WITThe oblique function uses a form of lossy encryption to convert PLAINTEXT into a witty-but-obscure cultural or social reference which will only make sense to people or processes that share a similar background with the calling program. WIT is a number between 0 and 7 which determines the cleverness and obscurity of the reference, where 0 will return a catchphrase from a recent television advertisement and 7 will return a reference to The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius. With careful application, this function can be used to create entire online humor magazines.
-- Open Source: It's mad, but you don't have to work here to help.
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.
-
To avoid surprises, Massive programmers weeded out ineffective agents and duplicated ones that worked. About a dozen initial master characters formed the basic genetic blueprint for more than 50,000 digital creations, which were then individualized by adding random variables such as aggression or happiness. (A few update Tolkien; keep an eye out for a background character in The Two Towers who, in the middle of the battle, seems to take a call on his cellphone.)
At least they're not calling in an air strike, like Granada."It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I saw an entire tech company destroyed by that video. Someone mailed it around the office and reduced all the programmers to gibbering drooling idiots, incapable of ever writing another line of code.
Yesterday I went and saw James Bond. There was a whole bunch of action movie previews (including LOTR) before that, where you could (barely) tell that all the action sequences were CGI... And I thought that now that they can do basically anything with CGI we are going to go back to good story lines to distinguish movies. No more 'the story was so-so but the effects where great'. Now that all the movies have effects for anything (explosions, fights, monsters, impossible scenes, dead actors...) they won't be able to do better only based on the effects. The newer Star Wars proved that. As effects become more commonspread and cheaper, I hope the money goes to the (good) story writers.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
and uits people who who download em liek you but dont fix the errors then upload em that cause these problems
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
I think the assumption is that since the book has been out for (checks book) 48 YEARS if teh date in my edition is correct, that the story is pretty well read and known by now.
You do realise this whole thing is based off Tolkien's books, right?
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
Yeah, I'm sure New Line spent $0 on promotion, and they get every penny of the box office with the theaters getting nothing.
...wearing a skin-tight topless leather jumpsuit, with cutaway buttocks and transparent crotch panel.
Actually, I was amazed at the bookmovie accuracy of Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, given the majority of the subject matter. Most directors would have copped out on the acid trip scenes and used it for an excuse to put their own (or the DP's or the art directors, or...) views of being under the influence on the screen.
Breakfast served all day!
It's the cripple.
It's himself.
The butler did it.
Nathan
The only one I knew who was wounded by enemy, rather than friendly, action was shot in the ass by an irate farmer, armed with a shotgun, who thought it 'them damn kids' after his livestock again.
Best Slashdot Co
I want to see an Ent beat the living crap out of Julia Butterfly Hill.
"Get those nasty feet off me, pathetic human!"
-FF
SQUEAK, the Death of Rats explained.
24 fps is what movies are shown at.
24 of those little film cells run past the light projector every second. However, if you could count the flashes of light on the screen, you would see 48. This is because, for every cell, an inverted fan with two non-blades (*), allows the light to pass through the lens twice. hence, each cell is flashed on the screen twice and the effective fps is 48.
I was a projectionist here in santa cruz for a while about 5 years ago. Fun job, basically just paid to smoke and start a few movies every few hours. Plus I got to toy with the sound in the theatres. I used to crank it up for the mib closing track.
(*) picture a fan with two blades. Now picture a metal ring connecting the outside of the fan blades. Now invert the fan-blade, no-fan-blade spots (ie, there are two holes which are smaller than the spots that don't all the light to pass through), and you've probably got a picture of this thing in your head.
I don't know if this is what you're getting at or not, but wouldn't it be cool if rather than UI, all 50,000 characters "filmed" in the movie were controled in some kind of realtime online battle game made specifically for the "filming" of the scene? And then you'd get to try to find yourself in the battle when the movie hit theatres?
Unfortunately half of the creatures would be spinning in place or jumping up and down and making gestures. But hey, it *could* be cool.
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
This is why /. needs a special "6" score for certain posts. God damnit, that's fricking funniest thing I have ever seen!
Yes, I believe so. What's more, Tolkien had names and complete family histories for every single one, too.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
You do realize you don't read every book in the library through telepathy just becuase you're within telepathic range of the library, don't you?
Handle with care. I read LOTR so much time ago that I forgot all the details. I'm trying and making a huge effort not to remember anything. Would be nice not to see many spoilers and still be able to have a discussion about the visual effects and other generics that do not tell what will happen.
unfinished: (adj.)
I suspect the latter; Tolkien had something of a reactionary bent. His books support a belief in a natural aristocracy, rather than meritocracy. His notion of bloodlines is inconsistent with hybrid vigor. ("The race of men has declined." "The blood of Numinor has grown thin.")
Also, living in WWII Britain, the men held the belief that there were 3 things wrong with yanks: overpaid, oversexed, and over here. A conservative might be more inclined to believe this than otherwise.
I love the books. I don't buy the ideology.
Had I also been available for those 60 years I might have read them.
Yeah, and in episode 2F09, when Itchy plays Scratchy's skeleton like a xylophone, he strikes the same rib twice in succession, yet he produces two clearly different tones. I mean, what are we to believe, that this is some sort of a (heh heh) magic xylophone or something? Boy, I really hope somebody got fired for that blunder.
Actually, that was the error that I noticed the most, and actually found annoying. We see a _lot_ of Frodo, and he's frequently standing right next to either Gandalf or Aragorn - and he varies enormously in height. Gimli stays much the same - it seems to be just the Hobbits who change in size.
This isn't a geeky pedant point like the comment about Scratchy's ribs; this is a fundamental physical characteristic of the main character of a major motion picture. Just how tall is Frodo supposed to be? This is something that _does_ get noticed; several friends who didn't really know the books came out wondering exactly how tall Hobbits were relative to Men. The film had been extremely ambiguous.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
No no, you've missed the point entirely. How else is a dog going to deflect a slapshot aimed at its head?
But what do I know. I'm just looking for anonymous gay sex.
"It was him" doesn't actually cover Memento. For that one, "It *wasn't* him" is correct.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
Actually the Playstation 3 is supposed to be clusterable. You'll be able to share processing power and thus be able to render stuff like this. I guess some of their R&D guys read Slashdot and thought "it'd be funny if you had a beowulf clust..."
(Sees his karma rise, then drop)
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
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
So far, the characters driven by these systems don't have real physics. They're mostly canned animation sequences being keyed by a state machine. Often, the moves are motion-captured and blended; otherwise they're created by animators. It's more of an automated cut-and-paste at the motion level than general motion generation as in robotics. The motions generated wouldn't necessarily work in the real world, but from a distance, they look good.
Incidentally, doing software for Hollywood is a pain. Hollywood film projects have two modes. Either the project is in development hell and they don't have any money but want freebies. Or the project is in production and there's plenty of money but no time.
but the hollywood infrastructure is such that writers are almost at the bottom of the food chain. Effects studios are definitely at the bottom, but once a script is sold the writer has very little, if any, control over it.
Next time you go see a movie, try and think about what was stupid and what might have worked if X or Y was different about it. You'll see that there are many promising scripts out there that get ruined by bad actors, directors, etc.
I'm not a screenwriter or an insider or anything, but I've had ambitions for a while, but decided that it was probably the most frustrating job in the world, to have your ideas taken and twisted around until they're an unrecognizable pile of steaming crap, for basically peanuts.
So I decided to go into CGI. God knows what I was smoking when I decided that one.
When Yoda was babbling on about fear, *this* is what he was talking about.
Do you watch them in front of an open fire drinking wine?
A nice chianti would seem appropriate...
Or maybe there just weren't than many 'coloured' people back in ancient england/euorpe where the story was set in.
Ah, I cough up scarier things before breakfast.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
No no, I was agreeing with him. Hence the thing about "no offense to you personally" I was making sure I mentioned that my diatribe was not directed at him, but at the people who noticed stuff like that and harped on it enough that he probably found out about it.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Actually, it's a pretty catchy tune.
I might actually see Twin Towers now, just to hear that theme song again.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
...and it was rejected. I'm confused.
This isn't a geeky pedant point like the comment about Scratchy's ribs; this is a fundamental physical characteristic of the main character of a major motion picture. Just how tall is Frodo supposed to be?
Somewhere in the documentaries or the commentaries or someplace buried in the ~18 hours of stuff on the extended edition DVD set, somebody makes mention of a really great point. Tolkien wrote (allegedly; see my other posts for my experience with the books) that hobbits are smaller than men a few times, but for the most part didn't keep bringing it up. He didn't keep saying things like, "Frodo looked at Gandalf, craning his neck upward and straining to make out the wizard's features from the approximate level of his belly-button." Instead, he just established that hobbits are shorter than men, and then moved on to talk about Tom Bombadil or some other damn fool way of avoiding getting on with the plot.
Er, sorry. Bit of a digression.
Anyway, the point is that they didn't spend a lot of time trying to get the hobbits exactly right in the films. They used a few tricky and expensive establishing shots to say that hobbits are shorter than men, and used scale doubles in every wide shot, but for the most part they just told the story and didn't make a big deal out of the details.
Actually, there are a few shots in Fellowship where they just didn't care about scale at all, but it works anyway because your eye is already accustomed to thinking of hobbits as small. I'm thinking specifically of the shot where Boromir tackles Frodo just before the big fight on Amon Hen. No scale doubles, no forced perspective, just Sean Bean body-tackling Elijah Wood. On the screen, it really looks like Boromir is twice Frodo's size.
I write in my journal
I for one look to the day when nations can resolve their differences with such software rather than actual warfare.
There is no excuse for sacrificing young lives when a simple computer simulation would show the world exactly how the USA would kick their asses deeply into the dirt.
Phallic Symbols in LOTR
When is this technology going to be incorporated into games? I want to raise an army and send it against my foes!!
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
Lord of the Cock Ring has been the named dubbed to a very, very off broadway play in NY. Its somewhere down in the village, I think Tribeca area. I really can't remember, I was rather drunk. A search of google or Timeout.com should find it though.
The backgrounds and the various vehicles were CG in Tron; everything else, esp. the characters and the "glow" suits (made mostly of foam latex iirc) were illuminated and colorized with mechanical animation masking techniques -- each on-screen frame with glow suit characters and CG background were laboriously composited on animation stands with handmade (!) opague stencils and different colored gels for the "glow" layers. Thus, TRON, while deservedly acclaimed for its spectacular CG pioneering efforts, did not as such really venture into CG character animaton.
Pixar's TIN TOY wasn't until 1988, and before that there really hadn't been anything remotely credible in the way of CG animated human (or truly realistic animal) characters, flexing skin and kinetic joints with tension, etc. Can you think of anything appearing before 1988 which had actual computer animated humans in it?
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?
Well, orcs are kinda green, does that count? And the Balrog was black. Yeah, he's a villain, but at least he doesn't rap or sells drugs.
Really, people who HAS to see everything through their own racist sensibilities are such lamers.
Damn. Have to remember to stop feeding the trolls...
Didn't you see "Robin Hood Prince of Thieves"? If you can sign Morgan Freeman, then you can have colored people anywhere, whether it makes sense or not...
Or we're all just being modded -1 Flamebait or -1 Offtopic.
*grumble*
I didn't watch any trailers for Die Another Day, I will not watch any for Star Trek : Nemesis, The Two Towers, Matrix 2, Terminator 3, or X-Men 2.
I guess I care too much about these movies to allow the trailers to ruin them for me. And trust me, I have a near photographic memory when it comes to trailers.
Education is the silver bullet.
Hey,
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.
Tolkien repeatedly stated that he did not intend his story to be represetative of anything. Isn't it possible that you're reading too much into it?
One could say that the Harry Potter series is about how if you want to succeed in life, you need the right parents, connections in the establishment, and natural sporting ability. But this would be, well, silly.
It's easy to 'read in' undertones that aren't there. Sometimes it's better to enjoy a book as nothing more than fiction.
Just my $0.02,
Michael
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
That's cool.
I have a few weirdo political/social/economic views, myself. =)
Education is the silver bullet.
Yeah, I thought the other posting was saying that it was Lenny that killed his wife. God that was such a good movie. Definitely required multiple viewings to catch everything. I also liked the use of black-n-white versus color to merge the two timelines (one going forward, the other backward) at the end. Brilliant!
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!