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Article about The Lord of the Rings MASSIVE Crowd 304

Posted by CmdrTaco from the one-hour-extra-footage-out-next-week dept.
TheOneRing.net has posted an article going indepth about LotR CGI, and specifically the rendering of extremely large crowds being done byWETA Digital. With the special edition due out soon, and TTT coming out in december, well let's just leave it at "Yay".
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Article about The Lord of the Rings MASSIVE Crowd More

Article about The Lord of the Rings MASSIVE Crowd

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  • LOTR topic on /. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Xpilot ( 117961 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @01:30AM (#4597730) Homepage
    C'mon CmdrTaco. We need one :)

  • Whoa, bigger crowds that before?! (Score:4, Funny)

    by SirSlud ( 67381 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @01:35AM (#4597748) Homepage
    Cause thats how I determine what movie I wanna see; the crowds! Spend millions on crowds. Millions, I tell you!

  • They have a MASSIVE CGI system... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Toasty16 ( 586358 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @01:35AM (#4597750) Homepage
    ...but they still can't make Frodo look like a guy.

  • WHAT?! (Score:2, Funny)

    by packeteer ( 566398 )
    I thought they really just used a bunch of actors. Of course they didn't REALLY use elves but damn now i feel let down.

  • should they have that on their site? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by NotAnotherReboot ( 262125 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @01:39AM (#4597762)
    Are they allowed to be scanning pages from the magazine and just posting them online? Seems like Popular Science is losing magazine sales from this. Isn't this copyright infringement?

    (I'm glad to see the article but I can't help but ask if they can legally put this up)

    • Re:should they have that on their site? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Gogo Dodo ( 129808 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @03:59AM (#4598025)
      Well, let's take the /. morality test and see:

      Does the article cover something of extreme interest to nerds? YES, duh! +2
      Does the article cover somebody /. respects? WETA, yup, /. respects them. Hmmm... -2
      Does the article cover some aspect that nobody knew about before? YES. +1
      Is the article posted on a for-free fan site? YES. +1
      Did the article come from an evil corporation? Popular Science is owned by AOL Time Warner and we all know how /. feels about them. YES. +5

      That totals up to +7 (and I probably forgot a few things), so it doesn't matter if it's copyright infringement.

      • re-arranging slightly....

        Does the article cover something of extreme interest to nerds? YES, duh! +2
        Does the article cover some aspect that nobody knew about before? YES. +1
        Is the article posted on a for-free fan site? YES. +1
        Did the article come from an evil corporation? Popular Science is owned by AOL Time Warner and we all know how /. feels about them. YES. +5
        Does the article cover somebody /. respects? WETA, yup, /. respects them. Hmmm... -2

        That totals up to +3, and so is morally ambiguous

  • Off topic but of interest to the LOTR crowd... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jerkychew ( 80913 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @01:41AM (#4597769) Homepage
    Purchase some of the servers used to render the CGI in the first LOTR movie here [infopop.net].

    Own a geeky piece of history!

  • "MASSIVE"? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @01:45AM (#4597780)
    I thought the last ALL CAPS NAME was FORTRAN because computers finally supported lowercase characters after that.

  • Easter eggs (Score:5, Funny)

    by atrus ( 73476 ) <atrus AT atrustrivalie DOT org> on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @01:49AM (#4597788) Homepage

    (A few update Tolkein; keep an eye out for a background character in The Two Towers who, in the middle of the battle, seems to take a call on his cellphone.)

    Damn, now I'm going to have to watch Two Towers like 5 times until I see that scene... great way to get me to spend more money :-/

    • Now you've done it. (Score:5, Funny)

      by Soko ( 17987 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @02:06AM (#4597830) Homepage
      (A few update Tolkein; keep an eye out for a background character in The Two Towers who, in the middle of the battle, seems to take a call on his cellphone.)

      Oh the irony...

      Just remember after you post this you are now fair game. What??!? you ask?

      If I'm in the theater to watch TTT for the first time, and you're in the very same theater but to see your fourth iteration, and you might be getting a little teensy bit bored, if you perchance forget where you are and you take a call on _your_ fucking cell phone, I get to kill you with my +5 Vorpal (Offical) LoTR Special DVDs.

      Fair warning, OK?

      Soko
    • Probably too old for most of you, but anyone else catch the Vulcan hand in the end of "Logan's Run"?

  • A digital analog (Score:4, Funny)

    by PsychoKiller ( 20824 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @01:58AM (#4597806) Homepage
    From page 42: 'This is a digital analog to a technique...'

    I know that this sentence makes sense, but it sounds so funny that it seems wrong.

  • Fuzzy logic (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mesozoic ( 134277 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @02:07AM (#4597831)
    The article mentions that in order to support such a complicated undertaking -- each character has anywhere from 100 to 8000 behavioral logic nodes to govern its behavior -- the creators of Massive used fuzzy logic to make their creations act.

    As far as I understand, fuzzy logic -- using probabilities instead of binary values -- has been given the shaft in most of the computing world. People can't wrap their heads around a concept that's termed 'fuzzy', no matter how solid the mathematics behind it are. Maybe this sort of accomplishment will open new doors for research involving fuzzy logic in computing systems.

    • Re:Fuzzy logic (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jdbo ( 35629 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @02:23AM (#4597871)
      I agree - this is a real accomplishment in terms of pioneering a new development methodologies, esp. considering how geared the typical CS mindset is completely focused on absolutely predictable results.

      I enjoy reading up on (some branches) of AI, and the most interesting advances (IMHO) in the last few years have been coming from the specific application end, i.e. video games and this... on the pure research end I'm still most interested in the work done by Douglas Hofstdater [indiana.edu] at U Indiana, but the work being done for games and movies really digs into on the important, but unsexy issues like "how the hell do we actually work with this stuff to get stuff done??". Sure, they've got a conceptually simple goal (make crowds fight!), but this is a case where the devil is in the details, but there are a billion details and the details are all that matters.

      Anyway, it's great to see that they've made strides in making this sort of non-deterministic (kinda-misapplied-term) functionality usable by normal humans.

      Besides, I'm freaking out at the idea of seeing 10,000 orcs (and the article mentions that there will be 100,000 fighters in one of the ROTK battles - yeep!)
    • Fuzzy logic doesn't use probabilities--just weights. Probabilities add up to 1. Fuzzy values can add up to more than 1. For instance, If I say a cup of tea is hot, and on a scale of 0 to 1 weight the "hotness" of the tea, I may rank it at .7 . Under a fuzzy system, that doesn't mean I rank the "coldness" of the tea at .3 . It could be more or less or equal to .3.

    • Re:Fuzzy logic (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Lars Arvestad ( 5049 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @02:45AM (#4597908) Homepage Journal
      When I have had fuzzy logic explained to me, it has not been about probabilities. Sure, the output is a number between 0 and 1 which you can interpret as a probability, but the logic part of it is rather more of a poor re-invention of probability theory. And if fuzzy logic has "been given the shaft", then that is why.

      Actual probability theory is highly regarded in CS. There are people spending their careers on probabilistic algorithms, where randomness is used as a powerful tool. In combinatorics, probabilities is used to for example show existence of structures ("probabilistic method"). Markov chains and processes are commonly used for modelling real world phenomena, and I would be surprised if they were not used in computer games and simulations for movies.

      In short: CS and probability theory goes hand in hand.

    • The problem with fuzzy logic is that if it would be useful, something else would be more useful. Sure, you can have a fuzzy truth value for whether something is hot or not, but you'd do better with a temperature measurement instead of a value between 0 and 1. There's very little that's useful when converted into a bounded linear range.

      Of course, fuzzy logic is only supposed to replace boolean values. But computer science has not failed to notice the limitations of boolean values; booleans are only used to control things where partial values wouldn't be useful.
      • The problem with fuzzy logic is that if it would be useful, something else would be more useful. Sure, you can have a fuzzy truth value for whether something is hot or not, but you'd do better with a temperature measurement instead of a value between 0 and 1.

        No, you wouldn't. Imagine you have a value WEIGHT equal to 1kg. Is that "heavy"? If you're talking about the weight of planets then "not heavy at all". If you're talking about the weight carrying capacity of an ant then "very heavy". Fuzzy logic conveniently bundles the values and the bounds into a single number.

        There's very little that's useful when converted into a bounded linear range.

        The second problem with what you're saying is that most measurement systems are linear (ie, temperature, weight, length) or exponential (ie, volume). Fuzzy logic lets you choose the most convenient "mapping" between actual measurements and fuzzy logic values. Apparently triangular mappings are very common, though I wouldn't know why.

        I think many people find it far too easy to dismiss fuzzy logic. It's not a stupid concept. It is not so obvious for the simple examples, but once you start combining multiple bounded-values you'll appreciate the conciseness and logical provability of fuzzy logic. It's very easy to go from your mathematically proven fuzzy logic statement to some C code, but it's much harder to extract the logical reasoning from existing C code.

  • Poster Idea (Score:4, Interesting)

    by the_one_smiley ( 169638 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @02:11AM (#4597842)

    On the topic of CGI, does anyone know if there exists a poster-sized rendering of the scene with Gandalf facing the balrog in FotR? Am I the only one that thinks this would be the coolest poster ever?

    - Smiley =)

  • The advertising is wrong re: the two towers anyway (Score:3, Informative)

    by bobgap ( 613856 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @02:18AM (#4597854)
    The Two Towers in the book are Orthanc and Cirith Ungol, not Orthanc and Barad dur.

    • Re:The advertising is wrong re: the two towers any (Score:5, Informative)

      by jdbo ( 35629 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @02:35AM (#4597891)
      Actually, you're half right; Tolkien's British publisher insisted on breaking up his 6 "book", 1 volume work into 3 smaller volumes of 2 books each (due to a paper shortage), which compelled Tolkien to come up with new titles (as the original 6 "book" titles didn't apply broadly enough to the new groupings - TTT was originally "The Treason of Isengard" and "The Ring Goes South", IIRC).

      In his letters Tolkien discusses his dissatisfaction with the title (though he came up with it), and vacillates as to exactly which two towers are referred to (!). Other towers he referrs to include Minas Morgul, and even Minas Tirith (although IMHO the last would only really be approp. for ROTK). I believe that Minas Morgul itself is described as having two towers on either side of its gates as well...

      Anyway, I'm happy with it being ambiguous - but as far as the promos go, it makes sense to "nail this down" to shut down the ridiculous WTC connections.

      And yes, you are correct, I don't have a girlfriend. ;)
      • Tolkien's British publisher insisted on breaking up his 6 "book", 1 volume work into 3 smaller volumes of 2 books each (due to a paper shortage)...

        Funny that, I always thought it was because nobody in his right mind would buy or read a novel of that magnitude. Granted the complete LotR pales in comparison to Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, but nobody who reads that (myself included) can be considered in his right mind.

    • Any of the Four Towers are correct. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Dai_Quat ( 619059 ) <(brcwrght) (at) (earthlink.net)> on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @02:51AM (#4597915)
      Here's the history behind the Four Towers. Any two will do: http://members.cts.com/king/e/erikt/tolkien/2tower s.htm This link explains that Tolkien changed his mind about that a few times. Really, the name was rather forced on him, for a volume that he didn't want released in that manner anyway. Book 3 and Book 4 of Tolkien's six-book epic became "The Two Towers." Tolkien himself drew three different covers for the book, one showing Minas Tirith and Barad-dur, and the second and third showing Minas Morgul and Orthanc. So you might as well call it The Four Towers, as Tolkien changed his mind about which two the title refers to. Here's a Tolkien quote that shows that for awhile at least, the Two Towers the movie refers to were possiblities left deliberatly vague. "The Two Towers gets as near as possible to finding a title to cover the widely divergent Books 3 & 4; and can be left ambiguous- it might refer to Isengard and Barad-dur, or to Minas Tirith and B; or Isengard and Cirith Ungol (1)." [Letter #140] -J.R.R. Tolkien Later Tolkien did settle on Cirith Ungol and Orthanc, because of the text of books 3 and 4, but conceded that Barad-dur and Minas Tirith, seemed less confusing. I think, as long as it's any two of the four, you can't go far wrong. I can see easily how Jackson's choice of Barad-dur and Orthanc makes a great match. "There is now an alliance between the Tower of Orthanc and the Tower of Barad-dur." It spells out, in a simple sentence, the power of the threat to Middle-Earth. Wait a second. I just posted a Lord of the Rings factoid on Slashdot! Coal to Newcastle! You guys probably knew this when you were in Kindergarden!

  • Create your own crowds (Score:5, Informative)

    by malducin ( 114457 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @02:34AM (#4597888) Homepage

    For those interested, you can purchase Massive. Stephen Regelous, the brains behind this app, showed it last SIGGRAPH. You can check their website here:

    Massive Software [massivesoftware.com]

    Softimage also just announced their own system:

    SOFTIMAGE ANNOUNCES SOFTIMAGE®|BEHAVIOR [softimage.com]

    • Re:Create your own crowds (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Animats ( 122034 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @03:57AM (#4598023) Homepage
      I think that's the old Motion Factory engine, which is a cute little system that wasn't very succesful as a game engine. Control is exercised with state machines with rule-based transitions. Some of the Stanford robotics people did it as a startup in the early 1990s. Motion Factory was used for Prince of Persia 3D, and never heard from again. Softimage (actually Avid, which now owns Softimage) bought up the company, and their CEO took over Softimage, a somewhat wierd result.

      $15K, though. Avid uses the Macho Pricing Model: if it's expensive, it must be Professional. Avid really bought Softimage from Microsoft because Softimage was coming out with Digital Studio, a compositing package which threatened Avid's overpriced compositing systems. Avid never really seemed to want the 3D business. There was a big exodus from Softimage when Microsoft sold them off. Softimage XSI came out years late, and meanwhile, the industry mostly switched to Maya, which is $2K for the base package (and free for a version that stamps giant logos on everything).

      Actually, the first really good crowd behavior engine used in a major motion picture drove the baby 'zillas in Godzilla. Unfortunately, the company that did that job went under shortly thereafter.

  • Lord of Jurassic Park (Score:5, Informative)

    by DAPence ( 623003 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @02:44AM (#4597903) Homepage
    Yes, the software used in "The Lord of the Rings : The Two Towers" to produce the massive Orc armies at Helm's Deep is based on that used for the Jurassic Park movies. The cool thing about the Weta software, is that each 'Orc' has a small about of A.I. behind it, which will supposedly give the effects a more life-like appearance. DAPence Webmaster, THELORDOFTHERINGS.com [thelordoftherings.com]
    • orc ai:

      while(all_your_ring_are_belong_to_us())
      {
      if(g runt()chief.grunt())
      whine();
      else if(!eat(hobbit)) order(hunt, hobbit);

      if (type==sauron) yell("grhhheee eye ssseeeees");
      else if(type==saruman) order(pizza, teenagemutanheroturtles);

      }

      what i'm saying is they should do tmht(or tmnt if you prefer) with this technological masterpiece. they might get decent acting in it too then.
    • I love the mention in the article of how the AI was a bit too good and during one scene, while most were fighting, there were a bit of the orcs that decided it'd be better to run away.

      There's AI for you - computer orcs becoming aware of survival!

  • Does anyone know... (Score:3, Funny)

    by bmurray ( 155117 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @03:02AM (#4597932)
    ... where I can get a leaked alpha version of MASSIVE?

  • This is nothing new. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Qender ( 318699 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @03:16AM (#4597956) Homepage Journal
    I remember seeing a television show about this kind of logic used to animate some scenes from "The lion king". Apparently no one was able to animate a stampede of several thousand zebras by hand.

    • Re:This is nothing new. (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @03:36AM (#4597986)
      Sounds like one of the Batman movies, the one with the Penguin. There was a herd of penguins running amok through the city, but they were all CG, with this 'logic' making them stampede correctly. Well, in the true nature of randomness, three of the buggers wandered off down an alley, while their comrades ran to attack Batman. Saw it on a Hollywood blooper type show last year.

      Overall, of course, who cares if penguins wander off? But just wanted to sound important. :-)
    • Were these stampeding lions attacking each other with weapons, choosing which combatants to fight against, oh nevermind that have you even seen LOTR 2 yet? If not -- SHUT UP AND WAIT.

    • Re:This is nothing new. (Score:3, Informative)

      by tolldog ( 1571 )
      That is a bit different.
      Collision avoidance is a different bird all together. They used something for 101 Dalmations (live action) as well.

      Sure it has some AI and the character sort of decides where to go, but typicaly, the inputs to the system are current location, goal location, speed and location of objects around it.

      Had they just wanted to run the two armys together, it would be similar to the systems used earlier. But the difference here is that they decide what to do when they get together, or if they even get together.

      -Tim

  • Easy... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Quaoar ( 614366 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @03:42AM (#4597998)
    All they had to do to get a large crowd of filty obese creatures of myth was to film a comic convention.

  • Next Version of Myth? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Dhrakar ( 32366 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @03:42AM (#4597999)
    The first thing that pooped into my mind when reading the article was that this could put a whole new spin on games like Myth. I mean if you could use a somewhat simplified version of the control nodes and behaviors to generate an army-- and your opponent (or the computer) did the same-- you could create some awesome battles. Even in the case of individual battles, the idea of better ai for each character is pretty compelling ;-) Oh, and for more fun, throw in some genetic/adaptive algorithms and watch as your characters get better and better...
    • Some games are getting close to this. Have you played Medieval: Total War? The game tracks each and every warrior in your army - thousands of them, and all of them in your opponents' armies too. I know that the game rates the performance of each individual warrior in a battle and then modifies his bravery/ cowardice and effectiveness based on that.
      This is quite a feat, considering how huge the armies and battles can get in this game.

  • Where to order FOTR Extended (Score:3, Informative)

    by cgrayson ( 22160 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @08:19AM (#4598764) Homepage
    According to my research, you can get the Extended DVD (list price US $40) at Amazon for $26 [amazon.com]. You get free shipping plus a "Movie Cash" ticket good for one admission to The Two Towers.

    The other contender is Walmart.com [walmart.com]. The price is the same, and you have to pay $3 shipping, but if you preorder, you get a free t-shirt [walmart.com].

    I'm not affiliated with either, just sharing my findings (and hoping if someone else knows of better deals, they'll post back!)

  • Autonomous computer animation (Score:3, Insightful)

    by heroine ( 1220 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @08:39AM (#4598853) Homepage
    Autonomous computer animation is the future. Unfortunately, while it is intended to lower the amount of work required to achieve a scene, it's sure to be built up to a level of detail requiring the same armies of hundreds of animators that previous computer animation required.

    • argh, you're forcing me into rant mode...

      I really truly despise the view that CG is to make movies cheaper, IMO CG should be used to make movies BETTER. Remember Jurassic Park? Terminator 2? Both examples were CG was used to create spectacular effects that couldn't be made any other way.
      Nowadays...CG is a cheap solution, that's why we see "explosions" that look like Office Clipart pasted on top of an object in MS Paint...

  • Massive Crowd (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Captain Large Face ( 559804 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @08:41AM (#4598862) Homepage

    A massive crowd already? Shit, the film isn't on general release until at least 18 December [imdb.com]! This will surely beat the queues for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Oh well, better go and fetch my sleeping bag and LoTR-themed Thermos flask.

  • TTT (Score:2, Troll)

    by Eil ( 82413 )
    Er, I hope the CGI in TTT is a slight bit better than that in FotR. Don't get me wrong here, FotR was very very excellent nearly all the way around, but the CGI in many parts of the movie was quite (in my humble opinion) substandard.

    My least favourite part of all is the CGI shot from way above that shows Frodo & Co running from beasties in the cavern. The unrealistic movement of the characters is the biggest giveaway, but the rendering also has all of the colors on the characters wrong. (I swear I could see a flat-shaded poly somewhere in there too.) It looks stupid and it would have actually made the movie better to cut it out and paste in a couple of quick shots of Frodo looking scared or something.

    There are other examples as well, but I've only seen the movie twice so I can't recall them in detail. Just seems like somebody involved in the production of the movie got carried away with the line of thinking, "Hey, we could do x with computer graphics and it would look really cool!"

    When it comes to CG in live-action movies, less is more.

    • Re:TTT (Score:3, Informative)

      by Krieger ( 7750 )
      Given the quantities of CG in the film, I actually appreciated the fact that so few scenes stood out as poorly rendered. The cavern scene bugs me everytime I see it, but it is also the only scene that truly makes me cringe about bad CG in the whole film. There are others that are fuzzy, but honestly they resemble the way normal fast moving film looks.

      All things considered the CG work in LoTR was outstanding. I am hoping that they would clean up the minor errors for the Collector's DVD.

  • How about that in a Game! (Score:4, Funny)

    by sckienle ( 588934 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @09:09AM (#4599019)

    Wouldn't this technology really make a War Game simulation really fun?

    "But I told you orcs to hold the flank!"

    "We couldn't help it, the fighting in the middle looked like so much fun!"

    Of course, you'd have to have one of those new 3.8Thz AMD chips to complete the battle in under a week....

  • Massive Computing (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Trova ( 577979 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @10:17AM (#4599452)
    I was thinking about which studio will be the first to try massive internet distributed computing power (a la SETI@Home) in order to render CGI secuences. The reward for collaborators could be discounts on tickets or a DVD credit pages just like those on the Extended Edition of The Lord Of the Rings.

    I prefer using my computer power for scientific projects, but I think that thay could not be too far away from today.

  • simple method for massive crowds ... (Score:4, Funny)

    by peter303 ( 12292 ) on Tuesday November 05, 2002 @11:43AM (#4600067)
    (1) Start on any college campus
    (2) Put up signs for an assembly
    (3) Offer free food and beer
    (4) Make sure the chicks are there
    (5) Offer free food and beer
    (6) Get a good band
    (7) Offer free food and beer

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