"Actually that's not what going on," Regelous tells me, "but people make it real by seeing into the simulation things that aren't really there." Fuzzy logic and fell beasts In another instance, someone else on the Weta team pointed at a couple soldiers fighting and thought he saw one soldier try to avenge another who had just been killed. Broadly, each character within Massive is called an agent.Īt one point, it looked as though some of the soldiers were running away from battle, and the initial assumption in the room was that maybe the agents were smart enough not to want to get involved in a deadly conflict. Regelous went to Weta Digital, situated in a small house in Wellington, New Zealand, and showed off a clash between 1,000 silver soldiers and 1,000 gold soldiers. Two years later, Massive's first battle wasn't nearly as detailed or realistic as Helm's Deep. Though he initially turned Jackson down, he eventually holed up in his apartment, even coding himself a stopwatch to track that he was actually working for eight hours a day on the project.
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So when director Peter Jackson asked Regelous to code crowd simulation software at the wrap party for Jackson's horror comedy flick The Frighteners, Regelous had an inkling of how it could work.
Well before orcs and elves could start hacking at each other in the name of Middle Earth, Massive was literally a dream.Ī current look at Massive's user interface. Now Massive is competing in a more technologically advanced visual effects world, against other programs capable of crowd simulation and rising expectations for special effects.įrom the Dothraki to the Wakandans - when the fate of the world is on the line, Massive is still marching into battle. It's a pretty substantial list of films and TV," says Bob Thompson, founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. " can see the impact by simply looking at the films that the software has been used on since Lord of the Rings over the past 20 years. Massive has helped fuel some of the most iconic battle scenes in just the last few years, including HBO's final season of Game of Thrones and Marvel's Avengers: Endgame. Entertainment Inc.Ĭutting-edge effects don't always hold up, but 20 years later, the Uruk-hai orcs from Helm's Deep look every bit as real and threatening as they did when they first charged the mountain stronghold. It was one of the first cinematic battles powered by Massive, a piece of software designed specifically for Lord of the Rings to create computer-generated armies using artificial intelligence to simulate realistic battles on a tremendous scale.Īs movies like Star Wars have revolutionized special effects and studios like Pixar shaped the use of computers in cinema, Massive, first built by Stephen Regelous for the world-renowned, award-winning visual effect studio Weta Digital, helped elevate what audiences now expect from onscreen battles. This bloody affair is the Battle of Helm's Deep, from The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Volleys of arrows fly, swords find their way to the weak spots around breast plates.
They rattle their spears and snarl through teeth that have never known modern dentistry, and when lightning strikes, it reveals their sheer numbers.
An invading force, 10,000 strong, marches through a storm toward a fortress built into the side of a mountain.įrom a distance, the combatants look like ants - menacing and alarmingly well organized.
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