Need a couple hundred thousand extras for that climactic sequence in your movie? No problem. Danny Chan talks to Stephen Regelous, founder and product manager of Massive Software, a New Zealand based company that develops its namesake 3D animation system for generating crowd-related visual effects for film and television. Below is an excerpt of the interview.Q: I understand that your company's establishment has something to do with the movie Lord of the Rings. How did it get started?

I became interested in writing a system that would utilize artificial intelligence-driven autonomous agents to generate animation in the early 1990s but the creation of Massive came later. I had worked with Peter Jackson as a Technical Director on The Frighteners in the mid-90s, and when he started his ambitious next project, The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, he approached me because he thought I could help solve a key challenge – creating armies of hundreds of thousands in the films.

Q: The Massive software is more than just a crowd generation tool. What else can it do?

Massive allows creative possibilities that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to achieve with traditional 3D animation systems. Massive is really good for epic-level scenes that require hundreds of thousands of characters, but it is also practical even if you need just a handful of digital characters that respond realistically. When you think about it, a movie may have a few really big shots with high character counts, but there are all of these other shots where you have 5 to 20 guys standing around that need realistic animation. Those shots add up. Our customers are finding out that they can use Massive in all kinds of other shots to help more efficiently tackle the huge amount of CG in movies today.

With some recent advancements in Massive, it's possible to use Massive agents even closer to the camera and hero characters than before. This widens the scope for use of autonomous agent characters.

In addition, people may not realize that Massive can be used for any type of character – and not just humans – such as insects, animals, bats, birds, vehicles, and pretty much anything imaginable. In King Kong, the traffic patterns in New York City were produced using Massive car and taxi agents. In The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, there were all kinds of creatures animated using Massive, even the rocks that the gryphons drop were Massive agents so that they could interact with the agents below.

Q: What are the hardware requirements to run this program?

A graphics processor card, such as the NVIDIA Quadro series, running on a PC with the Linux operating system, a 2 Ghz processor or higher and at least 1 Gigabyte of RAM.

We're pretty excited about our new GPU accelerated Velocity renderer. You no longer need a software render application to

render Massive scenes. Using an NVIDIA Quadro series graphic card Massive scenes can be rendered up to 30 times faster than with software renders.

Q: What is the learning curve for an animator working with the Massive software for the first time?

With our out-of-the-box solution Massive Jet and a pre-built Massive Ready-to-Run Agent, an artist can begin building Massive

scenes almost immediately. And for those who wish to use Massive Prime to build their own agents, we supply tutorials that cover every aspect of using Massive. It usually takes people less than two weeks to get through the entire course at which point they should be reasonably competent with Massive.

Q: To what extent is this software a plug-and-run system?

Massive's library of Ready-to-Run Agents was designed to let artists quickly populate Massive scenes. With Massive Jet, you

place and direct Ready-to-Run Agents in a scene, and you can control behavioral parameters, agent appearance, variation, etc.

Ready-to-Run Agents exist for locomotion, spectator action, combat and mayhem and we are working on other agents for common scenarios.

Q: How do the animators manipulate the characters or agents?

To interactively author, direct and render unique AI-enabled characters from scratch, you would use Massive Prime, which has more advanced functionality such as brain editing. You still don't need to do any programming because even customizing AI behaviors and procedural animation can be done with an artist-friendly, node-based interface in Massive Prime. You can also use Ready-to-Run Agents in Massive Prime to speed the production of huge-scale scenes.

Q: Let's say I need like half a million soldiers wearing a specially designed uniform to be charging down a hill. Do I simply buy the software from you, or do you have to custom design the army for me?

You could get Massive Jet and the locomotion agent and swap his clothes. As long as he doesn't have to do anything that the locomotion agent can't do, it should be pretty straightforward.

Q: Which have been the most challenging projects that you have had to take on to date?

Our customers have met a number of amazing challenges and the work gets more and more creative and ambitious as a result. There was obviously a huge amount of achievement by Weta Digital on The Lord of the Rings movies, culminating in the final movie, The Return of the King, and more recently in the VFX for King Kong. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe saw Rhythm & Hues creating some 450,000 total characters and more than 50 different types of Massive agents. Rhythm & Hues also used Massive to produce all of the Shibuya Square scenes for The Fast & The Furious: Tokyo Drift, even having their Massive characters observe a classically Asian version of personal space.

The Mill is always innovating with Massive in television commercials. They have a new ad out called Lynx "Billions", very impressive. "The Big Ad", which was done by Animal Logic, continues to be one of my favorites.

Q: Has the software undergone any refinements or upgrades since its development?

During production of The Two Towers, I added a very fast and stable cloth solver that was most useful for the capes and blankets on the Rohirrim and their horses. More recently, we added blend shape animation, which is often used for facial animation, and now we also support subdivision surfaces. Together, these last two features facilitate the use of Massive agents right next to hero characters, as you'll be able to see in a new animated movie called The Ant Bully.

Q: What are the cost benefits of using Massive software?

King Kong contained over 600 Massive shots, and most of those were done using only 4 Massive licenses running on 4 PCs. Most

television commercials that use Massive are completed using only a single license. And because Massive can be used for pretty much anything that moves, any studio that gets Massive can use it to create all kinds of wonderful things, such as the insects and bats in King Kong, or even the snakes in Elektra. So sequences that would otherwise require dozens of artists and dozens of workstations can now be completed by very small teams or even a single artist using Massive. The Velocity renderer also adds to the cost benefits of using Massive, since now it's possible for an artist to render scenes of epic proportions on a single workstation.

Q: Besides Peter Jackson, who are your other clients?

Massive is used around the world in the production of animation and visual effects for film, television and commercial advertisements. Our customers include Weta Digital, The Mill, Rhythm & Hues, Animal Logic, Digital Domain, DNA/Helix, Method Studios, Rushes, Fame Entertainment, Centro Digital, CIS Hollywood, Ollin Studio, Attitude Studio and many others.

Q: What other future projects can we expect to see Massive in action?

Very recently, the Hollywood movies Poseidon, The Fast & the Furious: Tokyo Drift and X-Men: The Last Stand all used Massive. We are looking forward to the work from our customers on the upcoming animated features The Ant Bully, Renaissance and Happy Feet. And we've been very hands-on with a new movie called Naresuan, which is being produced in Thailand and is the country's largest film production to date.

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