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WETA Digital Operations Mgr. Talks Special Effects

Posted by timothy on Thu Mar 13, 2003 06:23 PM
from the and-a-one-and-a-two-and-a dept.
Media Movies
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."
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  • 64-bit procs (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Sgs-Cruz (526085) on Thursday March 13 2003, @06:31PM (#5507621) Homepage Journal
    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 :) :)
    • "Peter Jackson is saying that the great battle must be several times larger than that of Helm?s Deep. This is not only stretching Massive to it?s limits but also the Intel 32bit processor architecture as well and Weta is looking at replacing the processors with 64bit ones. Whatever they do, RoTK is set to be pretty spectacular."

      If that doesn't answer all the standard /. questions similar to "why are 64-bit processors even needed" I don't know what will. However, contrarilly, this could be the evidence th

    • 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
  • 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.

    • Re:AI? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Sgs-Cruz (526085) on Thursday March 13 2003, @06:36PM (#5507662) Homepage Journal
      Yeah man... that's their MASSIVE [cfxweb.net] 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 :).

      • Re:AI? (Score:2, Informative)

        by GreeboNZ (651715)
        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.
  • WETA [weta.org] is a public television station in DC. Weta [wetafx.co.nz] is where this guy works.
  • 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 wonder if they know (Score:4, Interesting)

    by faust2097 (137829) on Thursday March 13 2003, @06:50PM (#5507767) Homepage
    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.
    • 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 t
    • Congratulations! You spotted one shot. Now go back and look for the 30+ shots you never even knew were there.

    • Re:I wonder if they know (Score:5, Informative)

      by Brendor (208073) <brendan.e@gma i l .com> on Thursday March 13 2003, @07:21PM (#5507989) Journal
      Though I agree with you regarding that particular shot, digital keying is not to blame here. That image reeked of color grading.

      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) [imdb.com] "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 . . "

    • Re:I wonder if they know (Score:4, Insightful)

      by dswensen (252552) on Thursday March 13 2003, @09:08PM (#5508504) Homepage Journal
      Well, I'm no film geek, but I took that "fake" look to mean that it was a magic staff projecting magical illumination, not a MagLite.

    • Re:I wonder if they know (Score:5, Funny)

      by spongman (182339) on Thursday March 13 2003, @09:40PM (#5508639)
      We're not fooled, it looks really fake
      Yeah, I agree. It doesn't look like any other magic lantern light I've ever seen.

      wtf?

  • Poor conflicted orcs... (Score:5, Funny)

    by aiken_d (127097) <aiken@bondage. c o m> on Thursday March 13 2003, @06:54PM (#5507792) Homepage

    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...

    Cheers
    -b

    • Re:Poor conflicted orcs... (Score:5, Informative)

      by gwernol (167574) on Thursday March 13 2003, @07:04PM (#5507873)
      " 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.
      • 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.

    • Re:Poor conflicted orcs... (Score:4, Funny)

      by NixterAg (198468) on Thursday March 13 2003, @07:22PM (#5507997)
      Must have been originally coded by a Frenchman.
  • "[big bumbers].... [big numbers]... [more big numbers]... Whatever they do, RoTK is set to be pretty spectacular... [ooh, look, even more big numbers]."

    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.

  • MASSIVE to the rescue! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 13 2003, @06:58PM (#5507824)
    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!
  • I knew test managers for networking products that had this much equipment to regularly test new nics coming out...

    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

    • Well for VFX houses it certainly a largish opertation. Considering many boutique studios (which do a lot of commercial and braocast stuff) might just be a couple dozen machines and people at the most. There are few companies out there with more capacity, like ILM, Imageworks, and a few more.

  • From Viewers Like You?? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Kaz Riprock (590115) on Thursday March 13 2003, @07:00PM (#5507845)

    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.

  • MASSIVE AI (Score:4, Informative)

    by SaXisT4LiF (120908) on Thursday March 13 2003, @07:07PM (#5507896)
    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 [popsci.com].

    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.
    • I'd like to see a flavor of this for FPS games. I'd like to be able to play as a single actor in a huge group battle (civil war, roman era, whatever) and have good ai opponents and teammates.

      I've often wondered if it was a rendering hurdle or an AI processing problem.

  • 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 d

  • WETA != Weta (Score:5, Informative)

    by Twirlip of the Mists (615030) <twirlipofthemists@yahoo.com> on Thursday March 13 2003, @07:17PM (#5507964)
    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 [bigjude.com]. 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.
    • If my memory serves me correct. Weta means "god of ugly things" in Maori.

    • Actually, WETA FX [wetafx.co.nz] itself likes to write it in all caps. Perhaps to differentiate itself from the bug.

      The weta is unique to New Zealand, much as is the kiwi bird. Perhaps New Zealanders feel the same sort of affection towards the bug as they do towards the bird.

      I have a friend who just got hired there to work on their motion-capture team. I'll ask him why they named it that and whether or not caps should be used.

    • 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.
    • My understanding (from a barely remembered interview from Peter Jackson) is that Peter wanted to name the company after a monster native to New Zealand. At that point, the movies that Peter was making were mostly visceral splatter fests. The ugliest, scariest thing he could find in New Zealand's rather small repertoire of native animals was the Weta - one of the world's largest and oldest insects. As frightening as it looks though, the insect is harmless.
    • A weta is a giant honkin' bug, indigenous to New Zealand. It looks like this [bigjude.com].

      So what the bloody hell is that Weta holding in its hand then?
  • 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?

  • rendering software (Score:4, Informative)

    by marhar (66825) on Thursday March 13 2003, @07:53PM (#5508156) Homepage
    And it's all rendered with Pixar's RenderMan Artist Tools:
    Joe Letteri, Visual Effects Supervisor for Weta Digital, said, "The new speed optimizations in PRMan 11 gave us the breakthrough we needed to put the finishing touches on The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. PRMan 11 has so many great new features that we couldn't use them all! "
    Quote here [pixar.com]
    Lots of interesting Renderman stuff here [pixar.com]

  • Bah! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    1280 processors and your rig can barely manage 24fps. Lamers

  • AI? What AI? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by nobbis (99441) on Thursday March 13 2003, @09:56PM (#5508734) Homepage
    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...

    • Other films? Peter Jackson's previous films. (Score:5, Informative)

      by LeoDV (653216) on Thursday March 13 2003, @06:56PM (#5507806) Journal
      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.

      • Re:Other films? Peter Jackson's previous films. (Score:3, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Actually Peter Jackson didn't jump directly from the low budget shlock of Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles, and Braindead, to LOTR. In between he directed a couple of excellent films - The Frighteners with Michael J Fox, which was perhaps not to everybody's taste, but nonetheless had some excellent special fx, and "Heavenly Creatures", which was (rightfully) critically aclaimed, and also had excellent fx. So there...
      • 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.

        Now that WETA is a large and sophisticated operation, I wonder what they will do once they've finished LoTR. There are only so many special/extended/director's cut DVDs they can release. A group of that size and experience is a

      • 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.

        Close, but not quite. Weta Workshop was not formed specifically to work on Peter Jackson's films, and did some work on TV series and commericals before providing physical effects for Meet the Feebles, PJ's second movie after

    • Re:Other films? (Score:5, Informative)

      by malducin (114457) on Thursday March 13 2003, @07:19PM (#5507981) Homepage
      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.
      • THX was always a separate entity, while LucasArts is a game company. On the other hand Lucas Digital encompasses ILM and Skywalker Sound.
    • 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.

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