Slashdot Mirror
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."
here maybe?
Yeah man... that's their MASSIVE software. (That's the name, I'm not calling the software REALLY HUGE.) It's really cool stuff... they talk about it in the article referenced as part of this story, in fact :).
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
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
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.
" When Massive was first tested two armies were pitted against each other to fight it out. Once the scene was rendered, a bug in the program was found. Agents were actually seen running away from the battle field! This simple bug was resolved by adding the rule "If you can't see an enemy, turn around". "
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...
Actually, funny though your comment is, the bit of the article you quote tells us that the original orc behavior was not them running away from battle. I've seen this mistake made enough times - including on Slashdot - that I'm sure its now a geek urban legend.
The article quote makes it clear that the reason they "ran away" was because they were looking for something to kill, not because they wanted to get away from the battle. The bug was that they just looked in front of them, couldn't see an enemy and so moved forward until one was in their field of vision. This would cause them to move rapidly away from the battle if they somehow ended up with their backs to the fight.
The bug fix described simply changed the behavior so the first thing they did if they couldn't see an enemy was to turn 180 degrees. This meant they charged into the fight, not away from it.
So you would never see the behavior you so humorously described.
Sailing over the event horizon
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
192 * 2 (dual procs) = 384
448 * 2 = 896
384 + 896 = 1280 processors
384 * 1GHz = 384 GHz
896 * 2.2GHz = ~1971 GHz
384 + 1971 = 2355 GHz
So yeah.. it works. Ironically, I'm also in New Zealand.
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 saw somewhere (can't remember now, although probably on the extended DVD set), that the problem was that the orcs at the back could not see the enemy. They changed it so that the orcs relied on sound instead of sight, and in that manner they could identify the location of the conflict even if it was out of sight.
Computers don't make mistakes. What they do, they do on purpose.
Weta Digital is a more recent company, than the much older Weta Workshop. Weta Digital worked on Heavenly Creatures, The Frightners and most of "The Ride" sequence on Contact, before doing LOTR. They haven't gottn much exposure because their small number of film projects and mostly being a company created for PJs' use.
By the way, LucasArts is a game company, you are probably referring to ILM.
You might be interested to know that Weta Digital was formed in part by a former ILM member, Wes Takahashi.
Basically color grading (in LotR) was the final digital color correction of the film, and was responsible for much of the films' palette (Blue-grays of Moria, Greens of the shire etc). Since the grading was done AFTER the final composite was rendered, it is noticable when they tried to do extreme shifts in color. FWIW, I think most of the matte work was pretty seamless (certain shots where focrced perspecive wasn't feasible, shots with actors superimposed on models).
(From IMDb) "About 3,100 shots (78% of the Super 35 film) were color graded at Colorfront in Wellington, NZ using 5D Colossus software after being scanned by an Imagica XE scanner full 2K resolution (2048*1536). The color-graded shots were then recorded on Kodak 5242 intermediate film . . "
Nup.. Having gone to the seminar, I learned that it was not that the AI was being too clever for its own good, but rather too stupid: the soldiers were programmed to do nothing but run forward until they encountered an enemy, at which point to fight. The crucial missing instruction being "turn around if there are no enemies in front of you". Quite amusing to watch, too.
Lots of interesting Renderman stuff here
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!