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WETA Digital Operations Mgr. Talks Special Effects
Xoanon (from TheOneRing.net) writes "I was recently privileged enough to view a lecture by Milton Ngan. As far as IT stuff goes, Milton has a pretty good job. You see, he is the Digital Operations Manager at Weta Digital. He is basically the architect for all the technical side of things at Weta. Last night he came and gave a 1 hour lecture at Victoria University outlining the hurdles and obstacles that needed to be overcome to produce the stunning 3D graphics lying in each of the Lord of the Rings movies. The lecture itself was full of lots of facts about Weta, the IT side of things and it also included some very cool behind the scenes shots of The Two Towers. The following is a detailed report from the event, where Ngan gave us an amazing behind-the-scenes look at WETAs infrastructure, their mainframes and various workstations. There is also a TON of info in regards to the special effects process, and news about MASSIVE. Take a look."
WETA is famous for the LOTR films, but what other films have they been involved in? It doesn't seem that they get the same kind of exposure as places like pixar or lucasarts.
What I find interesting is that they want to convert all those procs over to 64-bit... times must be good to afford that! (Of course they are, what am I talking about...) Still, I like the fact that they're all running linux (well 220 of 300 commodity-grade workstations are anyway... or something like that...), that's pretty cool. To weta: you guys rock. Just do a better job on the blue-screening of the ents next time :) :)
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
My friends and I were discussing the huge battle scene at Helm's Deep, and someone mentioned that the legions of orcs, humans and elves were not only rendered with 3d graphics; but also used AI to make the battle more compelling. Now, I'm unsure as to where he found this information, but it sure sounds interesting.
Yeah, as someone in the Capital area, I was surprised to see that our local public television (and radio) station was at the cutting edge of special effects. Please, posters, be careful about how you capitalize stuff. The SFX company is Weta, not WETA (usually pronounced "double-u ee tee ay").
one hundred twenty
is just enough characters
to write a haiku
WETA is a public television station in DC. Weta is where this guy works.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
Would surely give "the ring" competition for power hungry middle-earth folks!
I would like to change the world,
but they won't tell me the source code.
Ngan gave us an amazing behind-the-scenes look at WETAs infrastructure, their mainframes and various workstations Mainframes.... I didn't know Weta had Mainframes.
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
Copycat!
this works:
It consists of 192 Dual Pentium 1 GHz and 448 Dual 2.2 GHz processors. A total of 1280 processors running at approximately 2,355 GHz.... Mmmmm.....
Is it just really cold in NZ or is it something to do with the water going down the plug hole the wrong way?
I bet he got the catalogue and thought...
mmm, imagine a beowulf cluster of these...
then he proceeded to build one.
that's why he needs the magic of special effects.
No one is fooled by your "digital keying". Please inform shooting units that we the viewers would really like them to use correct lighting instead of fixing it in post.
For the worst example of this, check out when Gandalf lights his staff when they enter Moria in FOTR. We're not fooled, it looks really fake.
Oh no! I'm going to be killed! Run away! Oh no, no enemy in sight! Turn around! Oh no! I'm going to be killed! Run away! Oh no...
Cheers
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
...and yet they still can't make Frodo look like a guy.
Weta was founded by Peter Jackson to handle the special effects for his previous movies, which were very gory action movies involving zombies and aliens (Bad Taste, Dead Alive) and required a lot of prosthetics, face masks, etc. so he started Weta with a few friends to handle that.
Obviously when he started LotR they hired a lot and Weta now is nothing like Weta back when Peter Jackson was this virtually unknown independent director of gory horror movies from New Zealand, but he's still got the same team, and that's why they joke (around the beginning of the second bonus DVD in the FotR Extended DVD edition) about LotR being the biggest small-budget film ever made.
And that, as far as I can tell, is the only message of the article. No information of any real interest. Couldn't we let them do their own advertising?
--Bruce F.
Maybe we could use MASSIVE to render Shrub's next Gulf War. Show it to him, tell him we won, and then we can move on!
That said I know of people that have responsibilities for 1000's of workstations and compute farms with multiple hundered extra computers.
Guess what WETA has sounds good, but it is hardly large when you are talking about enterprise computing
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
No, he looks like a hobbit. Well a bit like one, an effeminate one, with a face a real man could go for, a bit like Kylie.
Samwise Gamgee" Gandalf said once I think. I wish he had added "And trolls should shut up."
No wonder they keep having auctions and pledge drives...with the hardware it would take to handle this kind of special effects.
PS - Before you moderate...know that it's a joke.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
They can react, fight and make logical decisions based on inputted given data. The program is so details that agents can get dirtier as the battle progresses.
Not a very detailed or well written article. There's a slightly better one on Popular Science.
From Pop Sci:
Massive characters, or "agents," function as complex beings subject to physical forces, with specific body attributes that range from the biological (short, good eyesight, dark skin) to the behavioral (aggressive). These features govern a Massive character's ability to generate credible motion. Each character is assigned a host of potential actions, as many as 350, each about a second long (sword up, sword down, step forward, step back). How these actions play out is determined by the character's brain, a tangled web of anywhere from 100 to 8,000 behavioral logic nodes, which provide the rules that allow each character to perceive, interpret and respond to what's happening around it: to make decisions and act. These nodes group into rule collections which control aggression, fighting style, movement across varied terrain, and a dozen other factors. Regelous originally tried to use pen and paper to sketch the relationships between nodes in a character. "It got chaotic very fast," he says, and Massive designers now use a special graphical user interface to connect nodes and create an agent's brain. A fully formed character--a map of its tendencies, its personality, if you will--looks like a huge, multidimensional spider web on the screen.
It sounds to be like a they used fuzzy logic neural networks. Interestingly enough, the battles would resemble Koza's Genetic Programming paradigm. Randomly generated orc programs, represented by tree structures, selected for fitness by success in battle. This would also explain how agents can get dirtier as the battle progresses.
Fight or flight its all the same
Live to die another day
--Ryan
I was home in NZ over Christmas and saw TTT in Wellington (at the Embassy theatre, where it premiered, huge Gollum and Ring above the entrance, very coolio). The next day I went to the LOTR exhibition at Te Papa (national museum). I would swear one of the video clips was an interview with the author of Massive in which he gave a slightly different explanation of the bug. I thought he said the orcs who ran away couldn't see the enemy because they were obscured, so the fix was to add a rule saying "if in doubt, follow your orc buddies".
// todo: implement sig
I don't know why the all-caps spelling, WETA, got all popular all of a sudden. The name of the company is Weta.
A weta is a giant honkin' bug, indigenous to New Zealand. It looks like this. Wetas can grow to be up to six inches long, and weigh as much as a small bird.
Why, exactly, it was decided to name a special effects workshop after a giant bug is left as an exercise for the reader.
I write in my journal
I am black, that means you is racist!!
Those agents must be french^H^H^H^H^H^H freedom.
I'd really like to know more about Gollum, but I just can't seem to find a link to a page about it - anyone know of one?
sic transit gloria mundi
A blooper that was shown was Gollum playing an electric guitar. Also a few shots were shown with Kermit the frog instead of Gollum. Even after the motion capture is done.
They should sneak these into the movie for the April 1 showings. The Fellowship meets the Rainbow Connection - now I'd pay extra for that one...
90.9 on your FM dial.
one hundred twenty
is just enough characters
to write a haiku
Lots of interesting Renderman stuff here
A few shots were shown with Gollum with his hair dyed pink and standing on end, another with his eyes floating out away from his eyes.
Wow, his eyes floating away from his...EYES? That's some pretty damn good special effects, if ya ask me!!
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
the blue screening in LOTR: TT was a little too "honey i shrunk the kids". hopefully they realized this and fixed it for ROTK.
-Mani
Someone please tell me about these. They could have wonderful medical applications, for fitting various things precisely to various parts of the body. The machine that hospitals are now using costs nearly $100,000. Need is for a 3D model of a body part accurate to about 1 mm. TIA for any info!!!
1280 processors and your rig can barely manage 24fps. Lamers
clients and the like but when animators waste computer time, animator time, etc they call it out-takes. I mean how much cpu time did it take to do "A good example of this was shown with a simple mock up of Gandalf standing still with Gollum jumping up onto his back and ripping off his head. Most of the actions were done by the computer." or "A blooper that was shown was Gollum playing an electric guitar. Also a few shots were shown with Kermit the frog instead of Gollum. Even after the motion capture is done. The animators will still need to go in and clean up a few details. A few shots were shown with Gollum with his hair dyed pink and standing on end, another with his eyes floating out away from his eyes." Sounds like the movies could have been done weeks earlier and with less equipment if the animators weren't goofing off all the time. Yes I understand that a little blowoff time is needed now and again, but if sysadmin's do it they are looked down upon or fired, if these animators do it people think it's cute/acceptable.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
WETA are the call letters of both a public TV station and a public radio station here in the Washington, DC area. Probably no relationship, but who knows.
Cantankerous old coot since 1957.
It makes me wonder who will be willing to use this software, and if it'll be limited to just other movie studios or not. Possibly game studios as well?
Its one thing if you use a network to run a potential hostile programm connected to the internet.
Practicing your animating/modelling skill by making fun sequences not used in the movie is quite another.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
The talk was co-run by Interface (the VUW Computer Club and ACM Student Chapter) and the School of Mathematical and Computing Sciences.
If you're a VUW student and want us (Interface) to do more stuff like this, you should join us .
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm a masters student in computer science at Victoria University in Wellington, NZ and went to this seminar. I'm as big a fan of LOTR as the next guy. However, I have this pet gripe. I agree that LOTR is an impressive feat of computer graphics but I'm annoyed by this talk of how MASSIVE is "AI on steroids."
There is NO AI in MASSIVE. Surely if AI means anything, it means the ability to optimise behaviour, or learn from data, or at least demonstrate adaptation of some sort. There is no adaptation in MASSIVE. Each agent is consulting a list of rules of what to do in a given situation and then executing the specified motion-captured animation. Not only is the motion not generated by the agent, but the rules are just hand-coded by humans. They're not even evolving these "brains."
The reason that it looks impressive is because instead of using identical, dumb, particle-like agents the agents have pre-programmed decision trees that generate their actions. Great work -- good programming job, but nothing that any hacker couldn't come up with. Show me a single agent in MASSIVE learning to walk or lifting a weapon or producing any movement that wasn't pre-scripted and I'll be impressed.
In my opinion the cool thing here is the remarkably ability of complex systems to generate interesting global phenomena from locally interacting agents.
Can someone who knows better please prove me wrong? I'd love to believe this was something more than a trumped up screensaver...
He's a guy but according to my church he's also gay.
I'll bite. Grab a copy of the extended DVD's documentary discs and realize how much of an ass you sound like since a large majority of FOTR was miniatures, models, and masks. The same for TTT and I am sure ROTK.
Moria, Helm's Deep, the Argonauth, Rivendell...I could go on and on. They freaking GREW Hobbiton.
Weta Digital is placed 11th on the NZ SETI@home with an average of 4 hours per WUs, but the last WU they completed was in January. They must of finished rending all the scenes for Return of the King.
So you're saying the agents didn't simulate intelligence artificially? As in, "artificial intelligence?"
Do we really want orcs with actual real intelligence, who learn halfway through battle how to dig a tunnel and get the hell away from Helm's Deep or not fall down from a charging horse?
They are probably using the term AI in the very loose sense that the game industry does. Massive is basically a sophisticated procedural graphical programming environment. If you have ever used Houdini, which is a highly procedural 3D animation package by SideFX, you would be very familiar with how Massive looks and works.
Artificial intelligence does not mean "simulating intelligence artificially."
If it did, then an actor with an IQ of 50 playing the role of Albert Einstein in a movie has intelligence because he's simulating intelligence. If we then replace the actor with a mechanical fish which sings the lines, this would now be artificial intelligence as the fish is "simulating intelligence artificially."
Every time I see a post to that site I hope it is a fake site and I just shake my head and wonder how people can get so lost in the midst of such Truth (if true).
robi
Uh it's a parady site written by atheists. Isn't it obvious?
Most of the actions? I guess they couldn't simulate the head ripping part. ;-)
I am not a robot. I am a unicorn.
Just like the simpson's, there should be a Jackie Chan reference in each article on /.
"(This is a digital analog to a technique developed by Jackie Chan, who choreographs onscreen fights by assigning different grunts to his attackers, based on the angle and type of approach; he can "see" them coming, even if his back is turned, based on auditory cues.)"
Preyy slick. I wonder if Jackie is working on developing his sonar.
robi
Well I wasn't going to rule out the possibility. The problem is, that there are churches that believe close to that. Go visit North Montana / Idaho / Utah. Shudder. I even know a few people that used to go to ones in Idaho.
robi
Issue 89 has over 40 pages of techy-goodies on the making of FOTR. Most of the article is set up as scene by scene breakdown paired with the technical aspects faced on the show (VFX and SFX). Also has a nice cover of Sam facing the Balrog which looks like it came from the Special Edition DVD.
Issue 92 has Gollum on the cover (possibly in the Dead Marshes?) and is an ever bigger treasure trove of detail topping 60+ pages (excluding those lovely full page ads) and is organized in much of the same way.
Both issues have really cool photos of the "bigatures" like Argonath, Mount Doom, the flooded stage of Isengard, stage for the Black Gates of Morder, Ent maquettes and the like.
1..2...3...hmmm....only 9 more months for ROTK!
The scaling was through the use of scale-foubles and perspective rather than digital effects. However the battles were humans (sometimes masked, depending on their role) blue screened on a digitally generated background with in the battle of Helm's Deep was about 95% of the force.
Uh it's a parady site written by atheists. Isn't it obvious?
Not really - they come across as mild and tolerent compared to some churches I've known members of.
One former friend is still shunning me.
I dared to suggest that for the the leader of his church to order everyone to get absentee ballots for an election, and to bring them to the church so he could be sure they all voted the way he ordered was unethical and illegal.
Apparently this was the "Tongue of Satan" speaking from my mouth, and he is not allowed to see me anymore, for I am "lost beyond redemption".
ummmm riiiiight. Theologically speaking, isn't it impossible to be beyond saving? But that sect probably just overlooks those sort of trivial (sarcasm) items in the Bible.
Unless they wrote their own "bible" (not to be confused with "Bible"), which makes doing stuff like making up your own reuls much easier to do.
robi
Because this is pretty much what AI actually is.
I recall a comment one of the teachers of a Applied AI course I took said: "The more we learn about AI, the more things we discover that are not AI."
Now there are projects where robots have learned to walk using AI. It looks like shit however, and is only "cool" if you actually understand how hard that is to make. If you showed it to the general public they'd say "Hell, my 2-year-old can walk better than that!"
Now I'll quote you on one other part:
Because this is what MASSIVE is. It's not reall AI but AL, Artificial Life. Athough AL is generally considered a subpart of AI, which is probably why they used that term (AI) to market it.
If only it were that easy.
Congratulations. You have successfully committed the common mistake of oversimplifcation by failing to note that there are multiple definitions of Aritifical Intelligence.
Mostly, I'm referring here to the debate over strong AI vs. weak AI.
IMHO, which is not necessarily the same as that expressed in the page I linked to, though it's probably similar,
strong AI is: Somehow constructing a computer system or robot such that it can truly think in the same manner as a real human being. By constrast,
weak AI is merely: Constructing a computer system or robot such that it can appear to be intelligent like a human at least in limited situations.
It's important to have these two categories. It may take many, many years to acheive the goal of strong AI. It may not be possible at all. On the other hand, we've got plenty of systems right now that meet the low goals of weak AI. Examples are: any Chess program, or any "expert system". These programs can appear to be intelligent at a specific task, but nothing more. You can't carry on a normal conversation with a Chess playing program, for example.
The little orcs running in the MASSIVE system count as weak AI because, although they may not learn and grow over time as a human would, and although they have to be programmed how to hold an axe, they do appear (vaguely) intelligent when you put them in an artificial battlefield. And that's fine because that's all the Weta people needed them for. :-)
Furry cows moo and decompress.
I thought you meant this WETA Digital.
Maybe it's not "real AI" but I still disagree that any hacker could do it. It's even less likely that any hacker could do it fast enough to generate scenes of such complexity in time for the film's release. That ratio of complexity/realism to compute cycles is far beyond what "any hacker" could do, and that's what makes MASSIVE a breakthrough.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
Landover Baptist?
Admittedly most their articles are funny because they're true (all their articles are based on "bible facts"). However, I think if you read all their articles and quizes you'll see they have a very cunning satirical nature.
I am a doctoral student working under the broad umbrella of AI. Because my background is mathematics, I've struggled for years to figure out just what these computer scientists are talking about. My conclusion is that AI means just about anything the speaker wishes.
One rather crude saying claims that "AI can be broken into two part, statistics and bullshit". I don't care for this assessment, but it makes it clear that even rather pedestrian stuff like decision trees and clever application of Bayes' Rule are considered part of AI by some people.
In fact, my work (and much of my lab's work) is all about making traditional statistics go fast. When you want a computer to (help) make decisions based on data, statistical methods provide a reasonable way to inform judgement.
My personal take on AI is that it covers just about anything which can be used to keep robots from stupidly running into walls.
Now, that said, my problems with characterizing MASSIVE as "AI on steroids" are:
1) The techniques used in MASSIVE are, at best, a subset of AI techniques. AI by most definitions is not a single entity that can be put on steroids.
2) Within the field I work in (call it computational statistics if you like), we use datasets with "hundreds and thousands" of data points as test cases for debugging. Our real data has hundreds *of* thousands of datapoints, each having hundreds of thousands of attributes. So in what way is a coarse simulation of an army 10,000 strong "massive"?
3) The goal of MASSIVE is simulation. If we're going to label stuff "AI", I'd prefer that the goal included "real-world", uncontrolled environments. Simulations can be useful when working on "real" tasks, but the simulation should not be the stopping point of any "AI" endeavor. I'd like to see that MASSIVE army of 10,000 deal with bad roads, monsoons, disease, insect migrations, faulty equipment, incorrect maps, politically-motivated leaders, etc. Dealing with noisy or otherwise incorrect and incomplete data is what separates AI from computational geometry, numerical analysis, and operations research.
In the end, MASSIVE is a simulation system lacking real-world data input, real-world interaction with uncontrolled environments, and real-world outcomes. To me, that's not AI.
However, I'm happy to compliment MASSIVE as a darn good simulation w/r/t appearance on-screen. Writing good simulations requires a good programmer. Sometimes, getting a simulation to resemble anything even remotely real is just as hard as building software that deals with the real world.
-Paul Komarek
Bingo. Thanks for that, Paul.
Personally, I'd go further and say that statistical methods are the only way of making informed judgement. In my view statistics is the problem of reasoning under explicit assumptions in the presence of uncertainty. Surely, that's exactly what AI is trying to achieve? If there's no uncertainty then you're just playing chess. If there's no assumptions then you're just inventing heuristics (read "hacks").
I think the difference between the two camps is that one (the computer scientists) focuses on the computational intractability of decision making, while the other (the mathematicians/statisticians) focuses on the uncertainty inherent in decision making. I do believe they've got a lot to offer each other, in particular statistics is finally seriously taking into account tractability.
My personal view is that all the careful positioning of the smoke and mirrors that the traditional AI'ers is doing isn't going to help understanding or even emulating intelligence in the long run.
I'd be happy if the term "AI" was tossed overboard and we all sailed off into the sunset of enlightenment under the power of Bayesian statistics and mathematical maturity...
Ah, so you're a Bayesian. I should have realized this sooner. ;-) Just kidding.
There are some cross-overs between your descriptions of the comp sci camp and the math/stats camp. My advisor, Andrew Moore, is one of them. The support for interdisciplinary work at Carnegie Mellon is the primary reason I came here.
Your comment about understanding or emulating intelligence reminded me of a funny quote from Andrew. I'd asked him if he had picked up any algorithm ideas from watching his son grow up. His reply:
"I try not to be biologically inspired. We can either write algorithms that work the way the human brain works, or we can write algorithms that work the way the brain *should* have worked."
Not only is it unclear whether neural nets have provided any insight into human thought, but it's unclear whether we should even care about human thought. Our brains are neat, but they might not be the best role model for building software.
I agree about the uselessness of the name "AI".
However, I must admit that "Artificial Intelligence" sounds a whole lot better than "The study of how to keep robots from bumping into things." (FWIW, my work has very little to do with robotics, but robots are cool so I use them in examples)
-Paul Komarek
Windows 3.1 Beer: The world's most popular. Comes in a 16-oz. can that
looks a lot like Mac Beer's. Requires that you already own a DOS Beer.
Claims that it allows you to drink several DOS Beers simultaneously, but
in reality you can only drink a few of them, very slowly, especially
slowly if you are drinking the Windows Beer at the same time. Sometimes,
for apparently no reason, a can of Windows Beer will explode when you
open it.
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