A jungle with character

What does the army of orcs in The Lord of the Rings have in common with the lush jungle in Avatar? It’s hard to imagine that the murderous hordes of Mordor would share anything with the beautiful greenery of James Cameron’s imagination, but it’s a pretty big thing to have in common. In fact, it’s massive.

We’re not just being coy. What they’ve got in common is how they behave, which is pretty fundamental. If you look closely at the battle scenes in LOTR, you’ll see that each orc looks like it’s moving individually, with its own mind. And in Avatar, each plant grows and moves according to the conditions around it, like in real life. Both the orcs and the plants are animated, so how can you make animated things behave as though they’re real and individual? Well, like we said, the secret is massive.

The Kiwi connection

The answer is that they used a special effects animation package called Massive, which stands for Multiple Agent Simulation System in Virtual Environment. This software has been responsible for some memorable big screen movie moments. It was first developed in New Zealand to allow the impressive battle scenes in The Lord of the Rings, but soon it was applied to rooms full of robots in the film I Robot, and even to dancing penguins in Happy Feet.

To make the jungle in Avatar, animators made each plant a ‘character’, the same way the marauding orcs had been. Rather than animating the thousands of individual characters by hand, the software uses computer science artificial intelligence techniques that allow each character to interact with the others around it in an individual way. In the case of the jungle, each plant began as a ‘seed’ with a certain set of rules to follow. For example, smaller trees died off as bigger trees took away light from them. Other trees fought for position underneath, and ground cover spread over the remaining space, wherever it could get light.

See hear

What about making more complex characters like the orcs, or the first TV characters to use Massive, the adipose from Doctor Who? Animated characters created by Massive have simulated senses of sight and hearing, can 'feel' the environment around them, and can also be given specific roles to play. Their brain is a network of 7 or 8 thousand logic rules that define what a character does and how they do it. The characters can 'see' what is around them as each is able to use a simple image created from their point of view in the environment, a bit like each character has a TV camera fixed on its head. Each character can see what you would see if you were in the same place and if one character can't see another character, then it won't react to it.

The software also allows the characters to hear. For example, in the Lord of the Rings battles, orcs emitted a particular sound (a frequency) and elves emitted a different frequency. So the orcs could hear nearby orcs and the elves could hear nearby elves and act accordingly. The 'sounds' faded away the further you were from the character making them. They also changed depending on what the character was doing, just like real life.

A crude sense of touch was also included. Characters knew when they came into contact with things in the environment and they changed what they were doing in line with this. For example a character would change posture to climb up a slope, or jump over an obstacle.

What next?

When the characters sense the world around them they need to be able to react properly. Massive uses master characters to do this, like lead actors in the scene these characters were able to cue the other characters about what to do. A master character is programmed to be able to carry out around two hundred main actions. These main actions can be created from the process of motion capture, where real actors are recorded playing out the actions a director might expect in the scene, running, falling, jumping and so on, and a computer vision system turns these human activities into animation blueprints to allow the characters to recreate them.

Along with these master characters' main actions, each character has a set of around 300 smaller individual actions to choose from, like scratching their nose or tripping over their feet. Characters at different times will be doing different actions depending on what they can sense in the environment, and what the master characters near by are doing. A clever bit of software called a motion blending engine takes the individual actions, like the action of walking up a slope, the hearing of a shout from the left, and the action of waving, and combines these all together to give the correct overall motion.

Back in

Using high-speed computers the special effects technicians can quickly create examples of the group scenes. The director can then fine tune the action by hand using a series of sliders in the characters' 'brains' to change the action in case the intelligent characters haven't got it just right themselves. This is because the characters brains work using a method called fuzzy logic. Normal logic says that something is true or false. It can't be anything else, and so the characters would need to be running or not running. In fuzzy logic the control is more like a slider that can go from true to false through stages in between, so characters can be 'sort of running' which lies somewhere between running and not running. This fuzzy 'brain' gives the characters far more variety, and the director much greater control of the digital cast.

Finally the Massive characters can be put into a scene with human actors. This is a process called digital compositing. The characters need to be the right scale to slot into the previously filmed footage, both in the foreground and also the background further away. Since the filmed footage and the animated characters are both digital it's a simple case to replace the appropriate live footage pixels with the character pixels, and suddenly our characters are there in the live action.

It's possible then to finish off by adding things like smoke in the atmosphere, or ensure that shadows from any live action are also cast on the animated characters.

So that's how they do it. Orcs and adipose terrorise, an extraterrestrial jungle grows and it all happens because of the same bit of software. An awfully important and groundbreaking piece of software, and, as we think we’ve mentioned, pretty big too.