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Linux Massive at the Movies
by Robin Rowe
8/18/2002

Thousands of Orcs in the climatic battle scenes at Helm's Deep in Lord of the Rings 2 are digital actors created by New Zealand production company Weta Digital using software called Massive. "Autonomous characters could only be done in a limited way before", says Massive software developer Stephen Regelous. "There's no way you can animate a hundred thousand characters in any other software in a reasonable amount of time". This special effects software is running not on Windows or Macintosh, but on Linux. The Massive software runs twice as fast on the same hardware running Linux as it does on Windows.

Linux, while number three in popularity after the Windows and Macintosh operating systems for consumers, has risen to the lead position in feature motion picture post-production. Linux broke into the Hollywood mainstream in 1997, when it was used for rendering most of the special effects for the movie Titanic. Since then Linux has been used in more than thirty blockbuster films including Star Wars Episode II, Scooby-Doo, Spirit, Harry Potter, Shrek, Collateral Damage, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Planet of the Apes, Final Fantasy, Fast and Furious, Cats and Dogs, and Grinch. Many more are coming. DreamWorks, ILM, Disney, Sony Imageworks, and many other studios have already converted most of their servers and workstations to Linux or announced conversions underway. The studios have tens of millions of lines of code of their own as well as using commercial programs such as Maya, Shake, SoftImage, and Houdini.

The Massive agent technology uses fuzzy logic, not traditional AI. Each artificial movie extra is an independent agent with a simple "brain" having rules as to how to interact with nearby objects. "It's fuzzy logic, but built as a network visually so artists can use it and not realize what they are doing is programming", notes Regelous. Agent brains are quickly constructed by connecting nodes in a hierarchy without writing code. To create a character that self-navigates around obstacles, you may combine the fuzzy values of "left" and "very near" in a rule with "slow down" and "go right". The brain also controls ordinary motions such as walking and can handle more advanced behaviors such as the emotions of being happy or sad, all in context with the objects around the agent.

At $40,000 you won't be making home movies with Massive, but you will be seeing it at the movies and may see the technology used in computer games. (www.massivesoftware.com)

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Mazeman.png: In window at right Mazeman is independently navigating through obstacles. Larger window displays nodes that make up Mazeman's brain. Small window lower center is Mazeman's subjective view being fed into his brain as he walks.