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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!
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.
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
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
This kind of reminds me of the middle-school "proms" we would have at graduation.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
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.
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.
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
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?
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
Yeah, it was almost like some bad Jerry Bruckheimer movie, wasn't it?
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
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).
Don't people ever learn? How many more people have to die before we stop using our cell phones during battle?
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
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? :)
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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/
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 ?
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
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.
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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.)
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.
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.
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
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
That issue of the Onion is one of the most amazing things I have ever seen in my entire life. I remember when it first came out.
I mean yes, those guys have done a wonderful job of producing biting satire for years, but to tackle a subject that sensitive so soon after the event itself was something no one in their right minds would do. And yet The Onion managed to find small glimmers of dark dark humour in an otherwise depressing event while still paying great respect to those that lost their lives and not feeling like an attempt to wring attention out of a horrible event.
Using humour to pay respect to a tragedy like Sept 11th is an enormous challenge. The Onion made it looks easy.
I found this article in particular to be a perfect balance of the two: God Angrily Clarifies "Don't Kill" Rule.
Once more unto the breach dear friends...