This weeks class main focus was on our Brief 1 project. We branched off into the groups we created last lesson to work on our projects. I discussed with the members of my group about the specific questions each of us wanted to cover. I will be focuses on the cultural and social disruption's Weta Digital and Peter Jackson had on the fantasy subculture of media. I delve into the technologies used (MASSIVE) to achieve their goals and bring disruption to the film and VFX industry.
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.
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 a fantasy setting. It brought the nerdy DnD and fansty subculture into pop culture. It showed that an often silly or misunderstood