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."

Comments

I wonder if they know

[faust2097]

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.

Re:I wonder if they know

[LeoDV]

Yes, sometimes it is pretty blatant, but I wouldn't be so harsh on them. First of all, to get the kind of light and photography they want, sometimes digital keying is the only way to go, and it's gotten pretty fucking amazing now (Avalon). Second of all, in CG heavy blue screen shots, it's sometimes all you've got to make the background match the close-up on Viggo. And third of all, the shooting was this rushed thing done by several teams at the same time, and since photographing a shot is such a delicate thing to do which needs a really talented team that wasn't always available so you need to cut them some slack. No movie at all, let alone one with such a huge budget has been shot under those conditions, and overall it's technically better than most blockbusters now.

Re:Other films?

[malducin]

THX was always a separate entity, while LucasArts is a game company. On the other hand Lucas Digital encompasses ILM and Skywalker Sound.

AI? What AI?

[nobbis]

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...

Weta SETI@home

[vertias]

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.