Academy Award literally a dream come true

By ADAM GIFFORD

The flow of Academy Awards gold has already started for The Lord of the Rings, with Auckland-based Stephen Regelous picking for a scientific and technical award this month for Massive, the animation software used for the trilogy's battle sequences.

"What it says is that industry experts, top leaders in the visual effects field, have checked it out thoroughly, checked out the competition thoroughly, and checked out what other studios are doing, and said this is by far the best, this is the one that has made the difference," Regelous said.

"This is the hugest stamp of approval any product can get. Usually products have to be round a few years before they pick up a plaque."

Another Lord of the Rings contributor, Ken McGaugh, picked up a technical achievement certificate, the next award level down, for his work (with Christophe Hery and Joe Letteri) on the subsurface-scattering techniques used to render Gollum's skin.

Regelous had no formal training in software development, but wrote programs as a hobby while he pursued a career making television commercials.

An earlier animation program, L-system, was sold to major special-effects software maker Side Effects and wrapped into Houdini, one of the industry standard 3D animation packages.

It was used for effects such as the redwood tree in What Dreams May Come, the brain sequence in Fight Club and by Regelous himself in Peter Jackson's The Frighteners.

Regelous said the inspiration for Massive came from a dream.

"About 1991 I was pretty interested in artificial life technology and using that to generate animation.

"Artificial life was an area of science about understanding the processes of nature and putting them in a new medium, and has become part of what is now called biometrics.

"I thought that while we had all these computers, we had animation software, but we were still doing stop-motion animation. Wasn't it time we harnessed the power of the computers to do something more for us, to have characters that interact with each other?

"I was reading too many books on artificial life, and I had a dream where some people turned up at the office and showed me something that was Massive and showed me how it worked, so I had a head start on how to write it."

It remained a hobby project until after The Frighteners, when Jackson asked Regelous to come up with ways to show armies of hundreds of thousands fighting.

He developed the software between 1996 and 1998, and was allowed to keep the intellectual property in exchange for giving Jackson's Weta Studios unlimited licences.

"Pete is not about making software, he is about making movies," Regelous said.

"He is also very astute - it makes more sense for me to continue keep developing it than walk away and leave it with some coder who doesn't have the same inspiration."

After overseeing the use of Massive at Weta for the first of trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring, Regelous started Massive Software as a separate company.

The software creates what are known as agents, sort-of artificial people, each with a "brain", which can respond to external stimuli and respond according to a set of rules.

That means there is not a lot of scripting required to generate or control action, and far less effort is required than traditional keyframe animation, where the animator needs to place the character's position on the screen in every shot.


Massive is not a big system, and it has been engineered so it doesn't need the huge computing grunt Weta required for its rendering systems.

"We pride ourselves on writing elegant software. When you are in production and you just write a quick fix, you end up with a mess.

"If you come up with an elegant general solution you are going to solve problems in the future and save time."

Regelous said that although Massive was identified with big battle scenes, it could be used in any situation where the filmmaker wanted autonomous characters.

"In The Fellowship of the Ring, it was used for several shots of the Fellowship itself running round, because it would have taken too long to motion edit or motion capture and keyframe all those guys running around looking like natural motion.

"Most obvious where they come out of Balin's tomb. It cuts from live action of them running out, shot from inside the tomb, to a high wide of the them running out, that is a Massive agent, and then continues as they run through the rubble and find their way round the pillars.

"There were lots of shots where Pete shot live action, 50 or 100 people in the foreground, intending to fill up the background with Massive agents, and was unhappy with the live action, so we ended up filling up the foreground with Massive agents as well."

There are almost 400 Massive shots in The Return of the King, many of which Regelous himself can't spot.

"It has to look real. If it looks like an effect, it is a failure."

Massive Software now has 12 staff in Auckland and Los Angeles.

The software is being used by Animal Logic in Sydney for an animated film about penguins, Happy Feet, and has been taken on by the special effects house Rhythm & Hues, in Los Angeles. Rhythm & Hues will be doing the special effects for The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe, which will be shot in New Zealand.

Although recognition in the special effects industry is welcome, it is a small niche market, and Regelous said the company was looking for other applications for the software.

Herald Feature: Lord of the Rings