Introduction

Today I'll be discussing a major disrupter to the film and VFX industry Peter Jackson, Weta Workshop and other's who helped develop Massive Crowd Software. Peter Jackson had 2 major issues to overcome to successfully create the many battles for film trilogy. First the scale of these battles are immense, in the source material of the books hundreds of thousands of humans, elves, dwarfs and orcs are in the War of the Last Alliance. An opening 3 minute scene in the first film. Which leads to it not even possible to hire that many extras for a scene, so it had to be created in CG. Secondly was that to create these battles in CGI to the scale needed would have been a hugely expensive and time consuming undertaking if it were hand animated. Massive was developed by Weta Digital as a software that would allow hundreds of thousands of soldiers to fight, a problem that had never been solved in film-making before.

Context of past Figures

Before Lord of the Rings the first large-scale CG battle scenes were in the 1997 film Starship Troopers. Paul Verhoeven’s sci-fi war movie had the VFX wizardry of Phil Tippett and Tippett Studios . Over 300 artists and technicians were hired to digitally breed those alien bug warriors, and the CG designs still hold up today. Though everything was meticulously animated individually, taking up huge amounts of time and resources. (Semlyen)

MASSIVE Technology

Multiple Agent Simulation System in Virtual Environment (or Massive as it's commonly called) was developed by Stephen Regelous at Weta Workshop with help from a small team of software engineers. It's flagship feature is the ability to quickly and easily create thousands of agents that can act as individuals as opposed to content creators individually animating a scene. By creating a brain "coding" with a library of motions to choose from and decides which of the actions an agent can do based on what the agents currently doing. The brain can control navigation, targeting, attacks or even adapting to the terrain. By also creating different brains depending on what the agent's role is (sword holder, small goblin, pike user) it allows the allocation of variety as well as consistency in actions of a group.

Social Change

The social change Peter Jackson brought to the mainstream fantasy culture was huge. The trilogy was the first highly critically acclaimed, financially successful film based on in a fantasy setting. It brought the nerdy DnD and fansty subculture into pop culture. It showed that an often silly or misunderstood culture for the wonder and freedom it can provide.

The technological advances in CGI done by Weta Digital were ground-breaking. Peter Jackson's desire to stay as true to the source material in terms of scale is what really drove the creation of MASSIVE. MASSIVE to this day is a software that has been implemented in vast number of big budget feature films from various other studios.