OUAN504 - MASSIVE

For one of my research tasks into the 3D animation industry and 3D as an industry, I've chosen to look at a piece of software a lot of people will have seen implemented in various media, but not heard of. 'MASSIVE' stands for 'Multiple Agent Simulation System in Virtual Environment' and is a high-end animation and artificial intelligence software package that's used for crowd generating visual effects in the film and television industry. The software itself was developed interestingly for Peter Jackson's 'The Lord of the Rings' when large crowds of soldiers and characters were required to fight in a battle setting. Up until this point the problem of crowds of this nature had not been solved, at least in terms of computer software so a developer named 'Stephen Regelous' created MASSIVE. Since this, it has developed into a complete product and has been licensed by a number of other visual effects houses.The main selling point of the software package is that it's able to create thousands or even millions by today's computer processing standards of individual characters or 'agents' all behaving and moving uniquely without having a team of animators spending a long time animating thousands of individual CG models. Furthermore, what I find personally quite amazing is that the software makes it so the individual agents or models interact uniquely with their surroundings, this includes other models. The reactions change the behaviour of the agent which is then controlled by pre-existing animation clips which are blended together in order to achieve a realistic behaviour. The pre-recorded animation clips can be obtained or created using motion capture, or even hand animated and then used as sources to use with the software. Aside from the AI properties of the software, there are a range of other features that MASSIVE possesses, including, cloth simulation, rigid body dynamics and graphics processing unit (GPU) based hardware rendering. Rigid-body dynamics looks closely at the movement of interconnected bodies under outside or external forces. The assumption that the bodies are rigid, which means that they don't deform when forces are applied. This simplifies the overall analysis by reducing the different parameters that describe the configuration of the system to the translation and rotation of reference frames attached to each individual body. I had to do some research into what rigid-body dynamics were as I hadn't looked into the information describing them until now.

Examples where MASSIVE has made an impact on the film industry is by encouraging the use of scenes and shots that just weren't possible before. In the words of Stephen Regelous, "You have to use the computer sometimes. For instance if you want 100,000 people in battle, you just can't go out and shoot that." Using Lord of the Rings as an example, during the introduction of 'The Fellowship of the Ring' there were some shots that featured 40,000 people. A huge number of agents and animated models all moving in synchronicity to emulate an epic battle scene. Speaking again in terms of Lord of the Rings as this is what the software was developed for just to show how well this software can work and how versatile it is, each solider in the battles that were shot had different soldiers which moved differently based on the weapons they had . For example, an Orc with a sword would react differently to an Orc with a spear, and this is all taken into account when the animation is filmed and when it's put through the software. Originally the first thing that was attempted using the software was making characters walk. This led to creator Stephen Regelous affectionately naming the software, 'plod'. However, the general consensus was that the software needed a more impressive name and so 'MASSIVE' was suggested - which eventually stuck.



The software package, MASSIVE has been implemented and used to create a number of crowd scenes in various high profile titles. These include;

• The Lord of the Rings
• Rise of the Planet of the Apes
• Avatar
• The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
• King Kong (Jackson, 2005)
• Carlton Draught: Big Ad
• Mountain, a television commercial for the PlayStation 2 console
• I, Robot
• Category 7: The End of the World
• Blades of Glory
• Eragon
• The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
• Happy Feet
• 300
• Buffy ("Chosen")
• Doctor Who ("Partners in Crime")
• Changeling
• Speed Racer (Car A.I. and crowds)
• WALL-E
• Up
• Life of Pi (Both the flying fish and Meerkat sequences were created with the help of Massive)
• The Hobbit