WETA Digital Operations Mgr. Talks Special Effects 180
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."
Other films? (Score:1)
Re:Other films? (Score:1)
An online Starcraft RPG? Only at [netnexus.com]
Re:Other films? (Score:3, Interesting)
Other films? Peter Jackson's previous films. (Score:5, Informative)
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)
Re:Other films? Peter Jackson's previous films. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Other films? Peter Jackson's previous films. (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Other films? Peter Jackson's previous films. (Score:2)
-Brett
Re:Other films? Peter Jackson's previous films. (Score:3, Informative)
Am I the only one who feels SFX have ridden the rise of computing (I hesitate to associate 1980-90s SGI hardware w/ intel, but . . .) to a point where the maket is so saturated and competetive that effects have become commodotized. Maybe this is "Score -1 Obvious," but it seems like ever since optical printers ha
Re:Other films? Peter Jackson's previous films. (Score:1)
Re:Other films? Peter Jackson's previous films. (Score:2)
Now that NZ is a trendy movie location ("Star Wars Episode 2 [slashdot.org], The Matrix [amazon.com], etc I am sure their services will be in demand from time to time.
Re:Other films? Peter Jackson's previous films. (Score:2)
New Zealand is a great location for films that need a natural backdrop... there is an amazing variety of unspoiled natural terrain for such a small country, particularly on the South Island. Definately on the short list of places to visit for me.
Re:Other films? Peter Jackson's previous films. (Score:3, Informative)
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 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.
64-bit procs (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:64-bit procs (Score:2)
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
So true (Score:2)
-Mani
AI? (Score:2, Redundant)
Re:AI? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:AI? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:AI? (Score:1)
It has long been rumored (and confirmed, I believe) that on the first run of MASSIVE, all of the AI soldiers turned and ran. The computer thought that was the best "attack" plan, I suppose.
Re:AI? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:AI? (Score:1)
Every single one of those creatures had its own "mind" as such.
None of them moved in the same way as another one. And all were designed individually, but didnt it make the battle look realistic.
There is more info on the battle on the LOTR DVD there may be a trailer here. [apple.com]
Could you fix the title? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Could you fix the title? (Score:1)
WELCOME TO WETAFX.CO.NZ
ENTER WETA DIGITAL LTD
Re:Could you fix the title? (Score:1, Redundant)
Re:Could you fix the title? (Score:1)
Re:Could you fix the title? (Score:2)
No, I went and looked before I posted, and yes, in that page the name is in caps, but so's everything else.
Further into the site they start using normal case and sentences and paragraphs and stuff, and there they refer to themselves as Weta.
Either way it's no big thing, of course. It's just that I expected a story with a local connection and got something very different. Very interesting, but very different nonetheless, and I found it needlessly (
And radio (Score:1)
Re:And radio (Score:2)
Mainframes.... (Score:1)
Re:Mainframes.... (Score:1)
Someone please explain to me how (Score:2, Funny)
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?
Re:Someone please explain to me how (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Someone please explain to me how (Score:2)
robi
I wonder if they know (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I wonder if they know (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I wonder if they know (Score:5, Informative)
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:2)
It jsut seems to me like it's a cheap trick now and is becoming more common.
Re:I wonder if they know (Score:1)
Re:I wonder if they know (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I wonder if they know (Score:5, Funny)
wtf?
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Poor conflicted orcs... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Poor conflicted orcs... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Poor conflicted orcs... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Poor conflicted orcs... (Score:2)
nbfn
Re:Poor conflicted orcs... (Score:1)
Summary of the article (Score:2)
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.
Re:Summary of the article (Score:1, Funny)
MASSIVE to the rescue! (Score:4, Funny)
Has a very small view of a "Large" operation (Score:2, Insightful)
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
Re:Has a very small view of a "Large" operation (Score:2, Insightful)
From Viewers Like You?? (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Re:From Viewers Like You?? (Score:2)
1) WETA (note capital letters in call sign) is a PBS affiliate in the Baltimore/Washington area, and
2) They were running their pledge drive recently (Send us $60 or we'll keep talking and talking and talking!)
PS. WETA is also a local radio station.
MASSIVE AI (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:MASSIVE AI (Score:2)
I've often wondered if it was a rendering hurdle or an AI processing problem.
If you can’t see an enemy, turn around? (Score:2, Informative)
WETA != Weta (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:WETA != Weta (Score:2)
Re:WETA != Weta (Score:2, Informative)
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 in Washington, DC (Score:2)
Re:WETA != Weta (Score:2, Informative)
Re:WETA != Weta (Score:2, Funny)
So what the bloody hell is that Weta holding in its hand then?
Re:WETA != Weta (Score:2, Funny)
Re:WETA != Weta (Score:2)
I wouldn't want to run into a swarm of them migrating, like the Mormon Crickets [purdue.edu] in Idaho. More here [weathernotebook.org], or here [blm.gov].
But serriously, I don't have them scanned in, but I took some pictures of the warnign signs on the highway because of the cricket migration. They cover the highway an inch think in places. IT makes the road too slick to drive at 65!
robi
Re:WETA != Weta (Score:2)
No need to go to Idaho to see swarms of bugs. I've seen three give-me-the-heebie-jeebies swarms in my life, all in California. Something about the ten year drought cycle we get here.
First was a cricket swarm in Los Banos. These were your ordinary black garden cricket. Just millions of them. I missed the actual invasion, but I did see mounds and mounds of them swept up into piles. You crunched when you walked down the
Re:WETA != Weta (Score:2)
But really, it must have been a mix of fun and nausea to touch thoe 'pillers.
robi
pretty interesting, but (Score:2)
Gollum (Score:1, Funny)
They should sneak these into the movie for the April 1 showings. The Fellowship meets the Rainbow Connection - now I'd pay extra for that one...
rendering software (Score:4, Informative)
Lots of interesting Renderman stuff here [pixar.com]
Gollum's eyes! (Score:1)
Wow, his eyes floating away from his...EYES? That's some pretty damn good special effects, if ya ask me!!
[Q] Mobile Handheld 3D Scanner (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:[Q] Mobile Handheld 3D Scanner (Score:2)
Talk to them about commercial / other versions or use of theirs (for a fee I'm sure).
robi
Re:[Q] Mobile Handheld 3D Scanner (Score:2)
The reason why the tech used by hospitals is so expensive is because it's used by hospitals. You wouldn't believe the amount of testing a
Bah! (Score:2, Funny)
Sysadmins get ball busted or arrested for d.net (Score:1)
AI? What AI? (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
Re:AI? What AI? (Score:2)
Do we really want orcs with actual real intelligence, who learn halfway through battle how to dig a tunnel and get the hell away from Helm's Deep or not fall down from a charging horse?
Re:AI? What AI? (Score:2)
Because this is pretty much what AI actually is.
I recall a comment one of the teachers of a Applied AI course I took said: "The more we learn about AI, the more things we discover that are not AI."
Now there are projects where robots have learned to walk using AI. It looks like shit however, and is only "cool" if you actually unde
The *other* AI (Score:2)
Congratulations. You have successfully committed the common mistake of oversimplifcation by failing to note that there are multiple definitions of Aritifical Intelligence.
Mostly, I'm referring here to the debate over strong AI vs. weak AI [charltonrose.com].
IMHO, which is not necessarily the same as that expressed in the page I linked to, though it's probably similar,
strong AI is: Somehow constructing a computer system or robot such that it can truly think in the same manner as a real human being. By constrast,
weak AI
Re:AI? What AI? (Score:2)
Maybe it's not "real AI" but I still disagree that any hacker could do it. It's even less likely that any hacker could do it fast enough to generate scenes of such complexity in time for the film's release. That ratio of complexity/realism to compute cycles is far beyond what "any hacker" could do, and that's what makes MASSIVE a breakthrough.
Re:AI? What AI? (Score:2)
One rather crude saying claims that "AI can be broken into two part, statistics and bullshit". I don't care for this assessment, but it makes it clear that even rather pedestrian stuff like decision trees and clever application of Bayes' Rule
Re:AI? What AI? (Score:2)
There are some cross-overs between your descriptions of the comp sci camp and the math/stats camp. My advisor, Andrew Moore, is one of them. The support for interdisciplinary work at Carnegie Mellon is the primary reason I came here.
Your comment about understanding or emulating intelligence reminded me of a funny quote from Andrew. I'd asked him if he had picked up any algorithm ideas from watching his son grow up. His re
Weta SETI@home (Score:2, Interesting)
Jackie Chan (Score:2)
"(This is a digital analog to a technique developed by Jackie Chan, who choreographs onscreen fights by assigning different grunts to his attackers, based on the angle and type of approach; he can "see" them coming, even if his back is turned, based on auditory cues.)"
Preyy slick. I wonder if Jackie is working on developing his sonar.
robi
Re:Jackie Chan (Score:2)
robi
If you HAVE to have more details.... (Score:2, Informative)
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
Oops! (Score:2)
Weta, not WETA (Score:1)
"The wise talk only of what they know, (Score:1)
Re:They have a MASSIVE computer animation system.. (Score:2)
Re:They have a MASSIVE computer animation system.. (Score:2)
robi
Re:They have a MASSIVE computer animation system.. (Score:2)
Re:They have a MASSIVE computer animation system.. (Score:2)
robi
Re:They have a MASSIVE computer animation system.. (Score:2)
Unless they wrote their own "bible" (not to be confused with "Bible"), which makes doing stuff like making up your own reuls much easier to do.
robi
Re:They have a MASSIVE computer animation system.. (Score:2)
Admittedly most their articles are funny because they're true (all their articles are based on "bible facts"). However, I think if you read all their articles and quizes you'll see they have a very cunning satirical nature.
Re:The stunning 3D graphics? (Score:2)
Moria, Helm's Deep, the Argonauth, Rivendell...I could go on and on. They freaking GREW Hobbiton.
Did we see the same EE? (Score:2)
The scaling was through the use of scale-foubles and perspective rather than digital effects. However the battles were humans (sometimes masked, depending on their role) blue screened on a digitally generated background with in the battle of Helm's Deep was about 95% of the force.