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MillimeterMassive Software 2.0
Jul 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Jordi Bares, The Mill
Intelligent Agents Aid Animators
For a recent PSA by KNOW/HIV/Aids, The Mill employed Massive’s 3D animation software system to design both the basic characters and their reactions to what they “see.” When placed in a 3D environment, characters can react to other characters as well as to their environment.
As a visual effects company, we are constantly updating our pipeline with tools we believe will enhance our creativity and make production faster, more flexible, or more efficient in some way.
One of the most important solutions we've added is Massive, the autonomous agent crowd simulation software famously used for the battle sequences in The Lord of the Rings movies. It's now a standalone 3D animation and digital stunt application that is making a big impact in television and commercials, as well as film.
Massive is unique. You can produce photo-real crowds, battles, and other scenes with epic amounts of animation that were never possible before.
But Massive doesn't work from the top down, as animation systems usually do. Instead of designing characters that need to be animated and manipulated each step of the way, you create autonomous agents. These can be people, animals, or non-human characters.
The agent's design includes all the usual skeletons, textures, and shaders. What's unique is that you also design a set of reactions for the agent, determining how it will respond to other agents or to the scene that's going on around it.
Unlike other solutions, which govern character simulations using a database search, Massive agents use a special vision process — they can “see” other agents, and that information triggers their own reactions. That use of fuzzy logic leads to a much more natural response than a simple “this or that” sort of branching tree logic. The many infinite degrees of interaction that Massive agents use create more unique and less robotic animation than what might otherwise be possible.
Since the character/agents play out the setup you've arranged, it's really easy for one artist — an artist, not a programmer — to do a complex shot that would otherwise take many hours and dozens of animators to complete.
I experienced this when we jumped into production with Massive for “Mountain,” a PlayStation2 ad for TBWA London that called for thousands of characters climbing, running, and piling on top of each other. Using Massive and a single workstation, we created and rendered 148,000 people. We beefed up the group of 500 actors filmed on set by using “brains” built in Massive, along with motion capture data, to quickly fill the frame with digital characters who animated themselves.
That spot, which won the Cannes Lions Grand Prix and other awards, led to our using Massive on another large-scale crowd job: “The Other Game” for Wieden + Kennedy/Amsterdam and Nike. Here, we applied both the 3D crowd tools and the built-in cloth dynamics in Massive to scale a stadium scene originally storyboarded at 300 people up to 93,000 screaming Brazilian and Portuguese soccer fans.
Because the director, Fredrik Bond, wanted to use a cable cam to get varied coverage and interaction with the spectators, we were very glad to have Massive in place. It's a very flexible and quick solution for doing 3D characters that act autonomously and are very “directable.”
Based on these and other ads under our belt, we've found that people are now seeking us out to bid on and do large crowd animation shots. And because we have Massive, we are able to give our advertising clientele even greater freedom in designing, photographing, and directing their work.
One of the great things about using the software is that once you have a Massive scene — a stadium with a few hundred to a few hundred thousand people sitting in it, for instance — it's much easier (and cheaper) to make changes and adapt the action and results in numerous ways. And once you have a Massive asset — a character you've built for a particular job or environment or one of the pre-built ready-to-run agents being rolled out for Massive, you can set up these really large shots in minutes.
Massive is not only a crowd tool, but also a choreography tool that can give directors a qualitative edge. They can move the camera as they need, while we can put agents in front of the camera that have a very sophisticated behavior to make the effect work.
Perhaps this is why the use of Massive translates so well to directors and audiences creating or watching commercials or films — the image is like a real crowd situation. The look can be controlled, but the people are doing what they need to do to complete the action.
On a real shoot, you say, “Go left,” and the actors or extras go left, but perhaps some do not. The scene's not necessarily as you imagined it, but it works. These sorts of “accidents” happen with Massive, and they can make a scene that's far more realistic than what you could animate by design. Massive is the only program that can replicate reality this way.
With Massive, the client or the viewer can look at your animation, scrutinize it, and start to see personalities behind the crowd. The commercial is always fresh. In what became a great, unplanned moment early on in the PlayStation 2 “Mountain” spot, you see this one agent begin to look for a way to escape. He's fed up with the crowd. He turns around and actually starts going back up the street. Now that's a Massive moment.
Jordi Bares is visual effects supervisor at The Mill in Soho, London. With clients including Nike, Sony PlayStation, Levi's, Pepsi, Guinness, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz, The Mill is an award-winning studio well known for its high-end visual effects for commercials, music videos, and television.
Check out what Massive's developer, Stephen Regulous, has to say at Siggraph by visiting our Siggraph blog at http://siggraph.millimeter.com.
