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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."
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).
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
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.
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.
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 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
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
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.
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.
THX was always a separate entity, while LucasArts is a game company. On the other hand Lucas Digital encompasses ILM and Skywalker Sound.
Lots of interesting Renderman stuff here
1280 processors and your rig can barely manage 24fps. Lamers
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 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.
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!