News for Feb. 14, 2004

Massive Wins Scientific and Engineering Awards

2/14/04, 9:57 pm EST - Xoanon

From: Oscars.org: The Scientific and Technical Academy Awards will be presented on February 14, 2004, at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Pasadena. Scientific and Technical Awards are given for devices, methods, formulas, discoveries or inventions of special and outstanding value to the arts and sciences of motion pictures that also have a proven history of use in the motion picture industry. To Stephen Regelous for the design and development of Massive, the autonomous agent animation system used for the battle sequences in "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy. Massive takes a new approach in simulating behaviors of large numbers of computer generated extras (a.k.a.) "agents." Each "agent" contains a primitive software "brain" used to develop behavioral rules simulating a wide range of behaviors. In "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy,over 200,000 agents were controlled in several scenes.