IMDb.com currently has ‘The Two Towers’ ranked second on their top 250 movies of all time-list; not because a lot of people voted for it but because a lot of people gave it a good grade. The number one spot is for ‘The Godfather’ and ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’ is currently at number 7. Check out the entire list here! Thanx to Morog for the heads up!
Day: January 26, 2003
From last weekend’s Sunday Times Culture supplement, here’s yet another article all about MASSIVE – the artificial intelligent crowd scene generation software used by Weta Digital on the films. Whilst most of it’s regurgitation of the excellent video documentaries on the Official Site, there are a few new snippets to be garnered. [More]
From last weekend’s Sunday Times Culture supplement, here’s yet another article all about MASSIVE – the artificial intelligent crowd scene generation software used by Weta Digital on the films. Whilst most of it’s regurgitation of the excellent video documentaries on the Official Site, there are a few new snippets to be garnered.
Massive Attack
A computer with a mind of its own made the awe-inspiring battle scenes in The Two Towers, reports Courtney Macavinta
In a sparse, sunlit loft, the programmer Stephen Regelous quietly works alone every day to the hum of his laptop. But what he is really doing is leading the masses. Regelous created Massive, the special-effects program behind the colossal battles in the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. Using Massive, the Oscar-winning Weta Digital team pulled off hugely anticipated scenes for The Two Towers – such as the battle at Helm’s Deep – by digitally generating smart crowds to supplement the live action.
The computer generated characters, called agents, have minds of their own. “Every agent has its own choices and a complete brain,” Regelous says. “The most important thing about making realistic crowds is making realistic individuals.”
To bring JRR Tolkien’s books to life, Gathering 70,0000 or so tall, broad-shouldered extras, dressing them in elaborate armour and choreographing them slaughtering each other was out of the question. And that was just one scene from the prologue to The Fellowship Of The Ring. So in 1996, Peter Jackson asked Regelous, who had worked on the director’s film The Frighteners, to come up with a program that could handle the task. In Massive, agents’ brains – which look like intricate flow charts – define how they see and hear, how fast they run and how slowly they die. For the films, stunt actors’ movements were recorded in the studio to enable the agents to wield weapons realistically, duck to avoid a sword, charge an enemy and fall off tower walls, flailing.
Like real people, agents’ body types, clothing and the weather influence their capabilities. Agents aren’t robots, though. Each makes subtle responses to its surroundings with fuzzy logic rather than yes-no, on-off decisions. And every agent has thousands of brain nodes, such as their combat setting, which has rules for their level of aggression. When an animator places agents into a simulation, they are released to do what they will. It’s not crowd control, but anarchy. Each agent makes decisions from its point of view. Still, when properly set up, the right character will always win the fight.
“It’s possible to rig fights, but it hasn’t been done,” Regelous says. “In the first test fight we had 1,000 silver guys and 1,000 golden guys. We set off the simulation, and in the distance you could see several guys running for the hills.” For inspiration, Regelous didn’t watch war movies as you might expect. Instead he experimented with artificial intelligence by growing digital plants, and studied how people avoided each other on crowded streets.
Massive is not just for making war. It was also used to generate doubles of the film’s stars and to create flocks of birds. “I wanted to take the processes of nature and apply them to generate computer imagery,” Regelous said. As a result, when the dark wizard Saruman sends his Uruk-hai warriors to Helm’s Deep to crush the human alliance in The Two Towers, the army isn’t made up of the same character copied and pasted 50,000 times, marching around like a chain of paper dolls.
“Every soldier is drawing from their own repertoire of military moves and determining how they will fight the fight,” explains Richard Taylor, director of Weta Workshop, on New Line Cinema’s site. “Some of the scenes in Helm’s Deep defy belief.”
Regelous plans to sell Massive for £25,000 per single floating licence. Even if he doesn’t win over the market, some say he’s made great advances. Seth Lippman, a technical director for the first two Rings films, said Massive surpasses techniques used for other Oscar-winning films he has worked on.
“In What Dreams May Come, the crowd characters were like 2-D billboards in space – filler. They couldn’t become main parts of the action,” Lippman said. “The illusion created by using the 2-D billboards would be exposed when employing the radical 3-D moves Peter Jackson is famous for. With the Massive approach, he could fly cameras right through the middle of the battle.”
For his part, Regelous is satisfied that Massive’s agents are covert enough to win over fans of the trilogy. “I can’t tell what’s Massive and what’s not any more.”
Originally reprinted by the Sunday Times Culture from Lycos News. Copyright © 2002 Lycos Inc. All rights reserved.
Thanks to Lee Loorien of the Lord Of The Rings Lab, we have some interesting news from back in November regarding the the Fourth Korean version of the books. Of special interest is the effort made by the translators to take the Old English etymology of Tolkien’s place- and people-names – and reconstruct them out of equivalent Ancient Korean elements, with the intention of preserving the same fundamental relative cultural meaning. [More] Updated! with some great photos of the books in question.
Thanks to Lee Loorien of the Lord Of The Rings Lab, TORn’s Korean community site, we have some interesting news from back in November regarding the the Fourth Korean version of the books. Of specific interest is the effort made by the translators to analyse the Middle-English/Anglo Saxon etymology of Tolkien’s place-names and people-names – and then for the translation reconstruct them out of equivalent Ancient Korean elements, with the intention of preserving the same fundamental relative cultural meaning.
“In November of 2002, we will have the Fourth Korean version of LOTR!! Until now; Korean fans have had a long, long argument about the translation of the books. Nobody has been satisfied by the first, second, and third versions.
“Moreover, each version has come from a different publishers. The first is a retranslation of a Japanese edition (more then 10 years old), Second was fine in its own way, but was not a legally licenced version (it’s a pity, at that time 10 years ago, Korean
publishers had no concept of ‘licence’ about foreigners’ material). The Third is a licenced
version – and it was good. But not perfect enough.
“So some fans have even insisted on Ancient Korean scholars joining the translating team for the new edition. And now we’ll all soon read this new LOTR, where the scholars have followed Tolkien’s wishes in the Appendices as best they can. (And you understand that that’s very very difficult.)
“I was the first of almost all the Korean fans to see the books yesterday (17th Nov 2002), at the Publisher’s offices (who have newly obtained all the license for all of Tolkien’s work).
“The translators are essentially the same people who did work on the second (unlicenced) version. I heard they had countless meeting for new LOTR, specially for NAMES.
“A example, ‘Dunharrow’ (hill-temple) is to gum-san o-reum, not just a transcription of the pronunciation of a word in Korean [Hangul]. They have made the word a-new, gum (meaning God, Holy Spirit), san (mountain) and o-reum (height). (If you have Korean language facilities, °Ë»ê¿À¸§ should render correctly if viewed in the ISO-2022-KR character set – Ara)
“Of course, new books are not yet ‘perfect’ – but we Korean Tolkien fans will be nonetheless travelling to Middle-Earth Utopia through them.”
— Lee Loorien
Updated Loorien has sent in these beautiful promotional images of the Korean editions of LoTR and The Hobbit as described above. Complete with Alan Lee illustrations – and PJ-style fontography (albeit in Hangul) of the actual booknames, they really do look rather nice.
Caz writes: Just to let you those English Bean fans out there know, Sean will be handing out a few awards at The South Bank Show Awards on ITV1 tonight (sundaynight) from 10:45pm to 12:00am. Be sure to catch it if you can!