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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.
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?
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.
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
I have this awesome rendering package called B.R.A.I.N...
I tried that technique too, but after 200 pages of Frodo and his buddies wandering through the woods and talking about mushrooms, my B.R.A.I.N. made me throw the fucking thing across the room.
Maybe I'm just a low-brow or something, but I tend to prefer books where things happen.
I write in my journal
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.
This kind of reminds me of the middle-school "proms" we would have at graduation.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
RUNAWAY!!
<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
Argh, there are TOWERS in this?
:)
Thanks for ruining the movie.
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 you need to install a plugin package called P.A.T.I.E.N.C.E.
Yeah, I heard that since Tolkein died there won't be a third book in the Trilogy. Whaaa! Now I'll never find out if Frodo and Sam made it to Mordor!!!
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
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.
You're on /. and haven't read LOTR??
/.'s infiltrated, the enemy agents are in.
Watch out,
Look a monkey!
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
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
yes.
P.S.- my wife just read the trilogy in a day or two.
I asked "How?!"
She replied "Oh, I skipped all that stupid singing crap. Man! They sing abou everything!"
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
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).
<whisper>
Did you just figure that out??
Sure, they decided to use "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." instead of "We're smarter than you. Suck it." like originally planned, but the result has been the same. </whisper>
Anyways, I'm really trying hard not to get too excited about little AI warriors each making their own combat decisions on screen. I'm really trying hard not to think about this. I tell myself, repeatedly, that getting excited about artificial intelligence is normal.
I think I need to shower.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
Actually, I am very much anticipating the Battle of Helm's Deep. Let me give you my good reason, and then my bad reason.
:)
The good reason is that, if I recall correctly (and I'm not positive I do), the three major battles in the Lord of the Rings are different: the Battle of Helm's Deep is about holding on with no reinforcements coming, the battle at Minas Tirith is heavy on Nazgul and is about holding out til reinforcements come, and the final battle is about dying valiantly in an effort to delay Sauron until Frodo can destroy the ring. So they do have different feels.
Anyway, the bad reason for why I am looking forward to the Battle of Helm's Deep is that I didn't really like the first LoTR movie that much. I was a huge fan of the books when I was younger (I read them, and the Silmarillion, dozens of times), but I felt that the movie lacked the sense of mystery and sadness (at the passing of the great ages of magic and elves) that the books had. To me, the magic of the written word could not be translated into the screen. I could imagine Gandalf somehow becoming more imposing, but seeing it in the movie seemed like a parlor trick rather than magic. Similarly, I could imagine Galadriel being somehow different and magical, but seeing her with a glow about her is just...too straightforward.
That being said, the one thing I loved about the movie was how beautiful it was. The scenes in that movie were astounding. And that's why I'm looking forward to the Battle of Helm's Deep.
Wouldn't that only be -1/2? :)
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
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.
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 ?
Aw fuck, all that moderation I just did, down the drain. But what the hell...
/. and haven't read LOTR??
/. and you're not a VIRGIN??
You're on
Translation:
You're on
And the inevitable follow-up:
Er, wot's that? I've read LOTR twenty-eight times, that once every year since my 12th birthday, and I'm certainly no virgin...I've gotten laid twice in fact...once by a hot "Ensign Ro" bird at a Trek convo, another time by an "Akane" at a cosplay...what's so funny?...no I'm not really British, I just say "wot" and "bird" and "convo" naturally...cheers!
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
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.
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.
Do you watch them in front of an open fire drinking wine?
A nice chianti would seem appropriate...
Very different to the movie isn't it? Lots of unecessary, and not very interesting detail.
Yes, unlike film, books must convey ideas that stimulate all the senses in simple print. Authors strive to describe sights, sounds and scents using nothing more than pen and paper. Some readers relish such writing and pore over the pages word-by-word. Others just want to get to the action. To each their own.