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WETA Digital Operations Mgr. Talks Special Effects 180

Posted by timothy from the and-a-one-and-a-two-and-a dept.
Xoanon (from TheOneRing.net) writes "I was recently privileged enough to view a lecture by Milton Ngan. As far as IT stuff goes, Milton has a pretty good job. You see, he is the Digital Operations Manager at Weta Digital. He is basically the architect for all the technical side of things at Weta. Last night he came and gave a 1 hour lecture at Victoria University outlining the hurdles and obstacles that needed to be overcome to produce the stunning 3D graphics lying in each of the Lord of the Rings movies. The lecture itself was full of lots of facts about Weta, the IT side of things and it also included some very cool behind the scenes shots of The Two Towers. The following is a detailed report from the event, where Ngan gave us an amazing behind-the-scenes look at WETAs infrastructure, their mainframes and various workstations. There is also a TON of info in regards to the special effects process, and news about MASSIVE. Take a look."
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WETA Digital Operations Mgr. Talks Special Effects More

WETA Digital Operations Mgr. Talks Special Effects

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  • WETA is famous for the LOTR films, but what other films have they been involved in? It doesn't seem that they get the same kind of exposure as places like pixar or lucasarts.
    • I believe they didn't do anything big until LOTR. Nobody in the mainstream had heard of Pixar until Toy Story came out, and Lucasarts became famous for SW and THX sound.

      An online Starcraft RPG? Only at [netnexus.com]

      • Re:Other films? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by malducin ( 114457 )
        THX was always a separate entity, while LucasArts is a game company. On the other hand Lucas Digital encompasses ILM and Skywalker Sound.

    • Other films? Peter Jackson's previous films. (Score:5, Informative)

      by LeoDV ( 653216 ) on Thursday March 13, 2003 @07:56PM (#5507806) Journal
      Weta was founded by Peter Jackson to handle the special effects for his previous movies, which were very gory action movies involving zombies and aliens (Bad Taste, Dead Alive) and required a lot of prosthetics, face masks, etc. so he started Weta with a few friends to handle that.

      Obviously when he started LotR they hired a lot and Weta now is nothing like Weta back when Peter Jackson was this virtually unknown independent director of gory horror movies from New Zealand, but he's still got the same team, and that's why they joke (around the beginning of the second bonus DVD in the FotR Extended DVD edition) about LotR being the biggest small-budget film ever made.

      • Re:Other films? Peter Jackson's previous films. (Score:3, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Actually Peter Jackson didn't jump directly from the low budget shlock of Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles, and Braindead, to LOTR. In between he directed a couple of excellent films - The Frighteners with Michael J Fox, which was perhaps not to everybody's taste, but nonetheless had some excellent special fx, and "Heavenly Creatures", which was (rightfully) critically aclaimed, and also had excellent fx. So there...
      • Weta was founded by Peter Jackson to handle the special effects for his previous movies, which were very gory action movies involving zombies and aliens (Bad Taste, Dead Alive) and required a lot of prosthetics, face masks, etc. so he started Weta with a few friends to handle that.

        Now that WETA is a large and sophisticated operation, I wonder what they will do once they've finished LoTR. There are only so many special/extended/director's cut DVDs they can release. A group of that size and experience is a

      • Weta was founded by Peter Jackson to handle the special effects for his previous movies, which were very gory action movies involving zombies and aliens (Bad Taste, Dead Alive) and required a lot of prosthetics, face masks, etc. so he started Weta with a few friends to handle that.

        Close, but not quite. Weta Workshop was not formed specifically to work on Peter Jackson's films, and did some work on TV series and commericals before providing physical effects for Meet the Feebles, PJ's second movie after

    • Re:Other films? (Score:5, Informative)

      by malducin ( 114457 ) on Thursday March 13, 2003 @08:19PM (#5507981) Homepage
      Weta Digital is a more recent company, than the much older Weta Workshop. Weta Digital worked on Heavenly Creatures, The Frightners and most of "The Ride" sequence on Contact, before doing LOTR. They haven't gottn much exposure because their small number of film projects and mostly being a company created for PJs' use.

      By the way, LucasArts is a game company, you are probably referring to ILM.

      You might be interested to know that Weta Digital was formed in part by a former ILM member, Wes Takahashi.

  • 64-bit procs (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Sgs-Cruz ( 526085 ) on Thursday March 13, 2003 @07:31PM (#5507621) Homepage Journal
    What I find interesting is that they want to convert all those procs over to 64-bit... times must be good to afford that! (Of course they are, what am I talking about...) Still, I like the fact that they're all running linux (well 220 of 300 commodity-grade workstations are anyway... or something like that...), that's pretty cool. To weta: you guys rock. Just do a better job on the blue-screening of the ents next time :) :)
    • "Peter Jackson is saying that the great battle must be several times larger than that of Helm?s Deep. This is not only stretching Massive to it?s limits but also the Intel 32bit processor architecture as well and Weta is looking at replacing the processors with 64bit ones. Whatever they do, RoTK is set to be pretty spectacular."

      If that doesn't answer all the standard /. questions similar to "why are 64-bit processors even needed" I don't know what will. However, contrarilly, this could be the evidence th

    • the blue screening in LOTR: TT was a little too "honey i shrunk the kids". hopefully they realized this and fixed it for ROTK.

      -Mani

  • AI? (Score:2, Redundant)

    by Metallic Matty ( 579124 )
    My friends and I were discussing the huge battle scene at Helm's Deep, and someone mentioned that the legions of orcs, humans and elves were not only rendered with 3d graphics; but also used AI to make the battle more compelling. Now, I'm unsure as to where he found this information, but it sure sounds interesting.

    • Re:AI? (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      here [slashdot.org] maybe?

    • Re:AI? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Sgs-Cruz ( 526085 ) on Thursday March 13, 2003 @07:36PM (#5507662) Homepage Journal
      Yeah man... that's their MASSIVE [cfxweb.net] software. (That's the name, I'm not calling the software REALLY HUGE.) It's really cool stuff... they talk about it in the article referenced as part of this story, in fact :).
    • That was the point of the so-called MASSIVE engine. It allowed the directors to assign distinct AI fighting styles to each different types of the soldiers. It even allowed them to view the battle through their eyes and make sure that everything went as planned.

      It has long been rumored (and confirmed, I believe) that on the first run of MASSIVE, all of the AI soldiers turned and ran. The computer thought that was the best "attack" plan, I suppose.

      • Re:AI? (Score:2, Informative)

        by GreeboNZ ( 651715 )
        Nup.. Having gone to the seminar, I learned that it was not that the AI was being too clever for its own good, but rather too stupid: the soldiers were programmed to do nothing but run forward until they encountered an enemy, at which point to fight. The crucial missing instruction being "turn around if there are no enemies in front of you". Quite amusing to watch, too.
    • I also found that amazing, the way the battle looked that is.
      Every single one of those creatures had its own "mind" as such.
      None of them moved in the same way as another one. And all were designed individually, but didnt it make the battle look realistic.
      There is more info on the battle on the LOTR DVD there may be a trailer here. [apple.com]
  • WETA [weta.org] is a public television station in DC. Weta [wetafx.co.nz] is where this guy works.
    • Okay, then why does the second link feature the name WETA prominently in caps at least three times (plus the image)?

      WELCOME TO WETAFX.CO.NZ
      ENTER WETA DIGITAL LTD
      • Um. You do realize that words written in all caps are not actually spelled with all capital letters, right? The name of the company is Weta, not WETA. It's named after a giant bug native to New Zealand, a bug called a weta.
      • Probably it also has to do with the font. Pixar has the same problem, because the font on their traditional logo uses all Caps letter. You can read about it on the RenderMan FAQ. If you click around inside the Weta Digital sections, it's spelled right: Weta.
      • Maybe because it's captioned for the visually impaired? :)

        No, I went and looked before I posted, and yes, in that page the name is in caps, but so's everything else.

        Further into the site they start using normal case and sentences and paragraphs and stuff, and there they refer to themselves as Weta.

        Either way it's no big thing, of course. It's just that I expected a story with a local connection and got something very different. Very interesting, but very different nonetheless, and I found it needlessly (

    • 90.9 on your FM dial.
  • Ngan gave us an amazing behind-the-scenes look at WETAs infrastructure, their mainframes and various workstations Mainframes.... I didn't know Weta had Mainframes.
  • this works:
    It consists of 192 Dual Pentium 1 GHz and 448 Dual 2.2 GHz processors. A total of 1280 processors running at approximately 2,355 GHz.... Mmmmm.....

    Is it just really cold in NZ or is it something to do with the water going down the plug hole the wrong way?

  • I wonder if they know (Score:4, Interesting)

    by faust2097 ( 137829 ) on Thursday March 13, 2003 @07:50PM (#5507767)
    No one is fooled by your "digital keying". Please inform shooting units that we the viewers would really like them to use correct lighting instead of fixing it in post.

    For the worst example of this, check out when Gandalf lights his staff when they enter Moria in FOTR. We're not fooled, it looks really fake.

    • Re:I wonder if they know (Score:2, Interesting)

      by LeoDV ( 653216 )
      Yes, sometimes it is pretty blatant, but I wouldn't be so harsh on them. First of all, to get the kind of light and photography they want, sometimes digital keying is the only way to go, and it's gotten pretty fucking amazing now (Avalon). Second of all, in CG heavy blue screen shots, it's sometimes all you've got to make the background match the close-up on Viggo. And third of all, the shooting was this rushed thing done by several teams at the same time, and since photographing a shot is such a delicate t
    • Congratulations! You spotted one shot. Now go back and look for the 30+ shots you never even knew were there.

    • Re:I wonder if they know (Score:5, Informative)

      by Brendor ( 208073 ) <`brendan.e' `at' `gmail.com'> on Thursday March 13, 2003 @08:21PM (#5507989) Journal
      Though I agree with you regarding that particular shot, digital keying is not to blame here. That image reeked of color grading.

      Basically color grading (in LotR) was the final digital color correction of the film, and was responsible for much of the films' palette (Blue-grays of Moria, Greens of the shire etc). Since the grading was done AFTER the final composite was rendered, it is noticable when they tried to do extreme shifts in color. FWIW, I think most of the matte work was pretty seamless (certain shots where focrced perspecive wasn't feasible, shots with actors superimposed on models).

      (From IMDb) [imdb.com] "About 3,100 shots (78% of the Super 35 film) were color graded at Colorfront in Wellington, NZ using 5D Colossus software after being scanned by an Imagica XE scanner full 2K resolution (2048*1536). The color-graded shots were then recorded on Kodak 5242 intermediate film . . "

      • Well, they included that shot in particular in the Digital Keying section of the bonus materials. The faults in that scene were both from the weird color correction and the flatness of the glow of Gandalf's staff. The color grading was far, far worse in TTT anyway.

        It jsut seems to me like it's a cheap trick now and is becoming more common.
    • Most of the shots involving the Ents in TTT had that poorly composited made for tv look to them. I don't know if it was just a mismatch in the lighting, or that they didn't do a proper de-graining job before comping all the layers together. It's a shame really, as the job they did on integrating Gollum into the shots was incredible.

    • Re:I wonder if they know (Score:4, Insightful)

      by dswensen ( 252552 ) on Thursday March 13, 2003 @10:08PM (#5508504) Homepage
      Well, I'm no film geek, but I took that "fake" look to mean that it was a magic staff projecting magical illumination, not a MagLite.

    • Re:I wonder if they know (Score:5, Funny)

      by spongman ( 182339 ) on Thursday March 13, 2003 @10:40PM (#5508639)
      We're not fooled, it looks really fake
      Yeah, I agree. It doesn't look like any other magic lantern light I've ever seen.

      wtf?

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday March 13, 2003 @07:54PM (#5507792)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Poor conflicted orcs... (Score:5, Informative)

      by gwernol ( 167574 ) on Thursday March 13, 2003 @08:04PM (#5507873)
      " When Massive was first tested two armies were pitted against each other to fight it out. Once the scene was rendered, a bug in the program was found. Agents were actually seen running away from the battle field! This simple bug was resolved by adding the rule "If you can't see an enemy, turn around". "

      Oh no! I'm going to be killed! Run away! Oh no, no enemy in sight! Turn around! Oh no! I'm going to be killed! Run away! Oh no...

      Actually, funny though your comment is, the bit of the article you quote tells us that the original orc behavior was not them running away from battle. I've seen this mistake made enough times - including on Slashdot - that I'm sure its now a geek urban legend.

      The article quote makes it clear that the reason they "ran away" was because they were looking for something to kill, not because they wanted to get away from the battle. The bug was that they just looked in front of them, couldn't see an enemy and so moved forward until one was in their field of vision. This would cause them to move rapidly away from the battle if they somehow ended up with their backs to the fight.

      The bug fix described simply changed the behavior so the first thing they did if they couldn't see an enemy was to turn 180 degrees. This meant they charged into the fight, not away from it.

      So you would never see the behavior you so humorously described.
      • I saw somewhere (can't remember now, although probably on the extended DVD set), that the problem was that the orcs at the back could not see the enemy. They changed it so that the orcs relied on sound instead of sight, and in that manner they could identify the location of the conflict even if it was out of sight.

    • Re:Poor conflicted orcs... (Score:4, Funny)

      by NixterAg ( 198468 ) on Thursday March 13, 2003 @08:22PM (#5507997)
      Must have been originally coded by a Frenchman.
  • "[big bumbers].... [big numbers]... [more big numbers]... Whatever they do, RoTK is set to be pretty spectacular... [ooh, look, even more big numbers]."

    And that, as far as I can tell, is the only message of the article. No information of any real interest. Couldn't we let them do their own advertising?

    --Bruce F.

    • Re:Summary of the article (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Didnt you know slashdot's policy of offering free advertising to companies that have installed a copy of linux somewhere?

  • MASSIVE to the rescue! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 13, 2003 @07:58PM (#5507824)
    Maybe we could use MASSIVE to render Shrub's next Gulf War. Show it to him, tell him we won, and then we can move on!
  • I knew test managers for networking products that had this much equipment to regularly test new nics coming out...

    That said I know of people that have responsibilities for 1000's of workstations and compute farms with multiple hundered extra computers.

    Guess what WETA has sounds good, but it is hardly large when you are talking about enterprise computing

    • Well for VFX houses it certainly a largish opertation. Considering many boutique studios (which do a lot of commercial and braocast stuff) might just be a couple dozen machines and people at the most. There are few companies out there with more capacity, like ILM, Imageworks, and a few more.

  • From Viewers Like You?? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Kaz Riprock ( 590115 ) on Thursday March 13, 2003 @08:00PM (#5507845)

    No wonder they keep having auctions and pledge drives...with the hardware it would take to handle this kind of special effects.

    PS - Before you moderate...know that it's a joke.

  • MASSIVE AI (Score:4, Informative)

    by SaXisT4LiF ( 120908 ) on Thursday March 13, 2003 @08:07PM (#5507896)
    They can react, fight and make logical decisions based on inputted given data. The program is so details that agents can get dirtier as the battle progresses.

    Not a very detailed or well written article. There's a slightly better one on Popular Science [popsci.com].

    From Pop Sci:
    Massive characters, or "agents," function as complex beings subject to physical forces, with specific body attributes that range from the biological (short, good eyesight, dark skin) to the behavioral (aggressive). These features govern a Massive character's ability to generate credible motion. Each character is assigned a host of potential actions, as many as 350, each about a second long (sword up, sword down, step forward, step back). How these actions play out is determined by the character's brain, a tangled web of anywhere from 100 to 8,000 behavioral logic nodes, which provide the rules that allow each character to perceive, interpret and respond to what's happening around it: to make decisions and act. These nodes group into rule collections which control aggression, fighting style, movement across varied terrain, and a dozen other factors. Regelous originally tried to use pen and paper to sketch the relationships between nodes in a character. "It got chaotic very fast," he says, and Massive designers now use a special graphical user interface to connect nodes and create an agent's brain. A fully formed character--a map of its tendencies, its personality, if you will--looks like a huge, multidimensional spider web on the screen.

    It sounds to be like a they used fuzzy logic neural networks. Interestingly enough, the battles would resemble Koza's Genetic Programming paradigm. Randomly generated orc programs, represented by tree structures, selected for fitness by success in battle. This would also explain how agents can get dirtier as the battle progresses.
    • I'd like to see a flavor of this for FPS games. I'd like to be able to play as a single actor in a huge group battle (civil war, roman era, whatever) and have good ai opponents and teammates.

      I've often wondered if it was a rendering hurdle or an AI processing problem.

  • I was home in NZ over Christmas and saw TTT in Wellington (at the Embassy theatre, where it premiered, huge Gollum and Ring above the entrance, very coolio). The next day I went to the LOTR exhibition at Te Papa (national museum). I would swear one of the video clips was an interview with the author of Massive in which he gave a slightly different explanation of the bug. I thought he said the orcs who ran away couldn't see the enemy because they were obscured, so the fix was to add a rule saying "if in d

  • WETA != Weta (Score:5, Informative)

    by Twirlip of the Mists ( 615030 ) <twirlipofthemists@yahoo.com> on Thursday March 13, 2003 @08:17PM (#5507964)
    I don't know why the all-caps spelling, WETA, got all popular all of a sudden. The name of the company is Weta.

    A weta is a giant honkin' bug, indigenous to New Zealand. It looks like this [bigjude.com]. Wetas can grow to be up to six inches long, and weigh as much as a small bird.

    Why, exactly, it was decided to name a special effects workshop after a giant bug is left as an exercise for the reader.
    • If my memory serves me correct. Weta means "god of ugly things" in Maori.

    • Re:WETA != Weta (Score:2, Informative)

      by MidnightBrewer ( 97195 )

      Actually, WETA FX [wetafx.co.nz] itself likes to write it in all caps. Perhaps to differentiate itself from the bug.

      The weta is unique to New Zealand, much as is the kiwi bird. Perhaps New Zealanders feel the same sort of affection towards the bug as they do towards the bird.

      I have a friend who just got hired there to work on their motion-capture team. I'll ask him why they named it that and whether or not caps should be used.

    • WETA are the call letters of both a public TV station and a public radio station here in the Washington, DC area. Probably no relationship, but who knows.

    • Re:WETA != Weta (Score:2, Informative)

      by Kiwiscientist ( 559531 )
      My understanding (from a barely remembered interview from Peter Jackson) is that Peter wanted to name the company after a monster native to New Zealand. At that point, the movies that Peter was making were mostly visceral splatter fests. The ugliest, scariest thing he could find in New Zealand's rather small repertoire of native animals was the Weta - one of the world's largest and oldest insects. As frightening as it looks though, the insect is harmless.
    • A weta is a giant honkin' bug, indigenous to New Zealand. It looks like this [bigjude.com].

      So what the bloody hell is that Weta holding in its hand then?
    • That thing has got to make some horrible sounds when squished.

      I wouldn't want to run into a swarm of them migrating, like the Mormon Crickets [purdue.edu] in Idaho. More here [weathernotebook.org], or here [blm.gov].

      But serriously, I don't have them scanned in, but I took some pictures of the warnign signs on the highway because of the cricket migration. They cover the highway an inch think in places. IT makes the road too slick to drive at 65!

      robi
      • I wouldn't want to run into a swarm of them migrating, like the Mormon Crickets in Idaho.

        No need to go to Idaho to see swarms of bugs. I've seen three give-me-the-heebie-jeebies swarms in my life, all in California. Something about the ten year drought cycle we get here.

        First was a cricket swarm in Los Banos. These were your ordinary black garden cricket. Just millions of them. I missed the actual invasion, but I did see mounds and mounds of them swept up into piles. You crunched when you walked down the
        • Man, if those things get any bigger (pick you insecto of choice) we will get some bad sci fi movies in real life.

          But really, it must have been a mix of fun and nausea to touch thoe 'pillers.

          robi
  • I'd really like to know more about Gollum, but I just can't seem to find a link to a page about it - anyone know of one?

  • Gollum (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    A blooper that was shown was Gollum playing an electric guitar. Also a few shots were shown with Kermit the frog instead of Gollum. Even after the motion capture is done.

    They should sneak these into the movie for the April 1 showings. The Fellowship meets the Rainbow Connection - now I'd pay extra for that one...

  • rendering software (Score:4, Informative)

    by marhar ( 66825 ) on Thursday March 13, 2003 @08:53PM (#5508156) Homepage
    And it's all rendered with Pixar's RenderMan Artist Tools:
    Joe Letteri, Visual Effects Supervisor for Weta Digital, said, "The new speed optimizations in PRMan 11 gave us the breakthrough we needed to put the finishing touches on The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. PRMan 11 has so many great new features that we couldn't use them all! "
    Quote here [pixar.com]
    Lots of interesting Renderman stuff here [pixar.com]
  • A few shots were shown with Gollum with his hair dyed pink and standing on end, another with his eyes floating out away from his eyes.

    Wow, his eyes floating away from his...EYES? That's some pretty damn good special effects, if ya ask me!!
  • Someone please tell me about these. They could have wonderful medical applications, for fitting various things precisely to various parts of the body. The machine that hospitals are now using costs nearly $100,000. Need is for a 3D model of a body part accurate to about 1 mm. TIA for any info!!!
    • They gave some info on the Extended Edition DVD set for FoTR (Disc 3 of 4). Check it out. I don't remember all of the details, but I believe it was a custom job done in the workshop.

      Talk to them about commercial / other versions or use of theirs (for a fee I'm sure).

      robi
    • I've cosidered doing one for a project in school. (Computer Vision) Although it does depend on how feasable the project is though. I do recall that the particular scanners used by Weta was custom hacks. I bet theirs required a bit of "hands on" adjustments afterwards to get the stripes of the mesh aligned. Part of my point here is that doing one yourself isn't impossible.

      The reason why the tech used by hospitals is so expensive is because it's used by hospitals. You wouldn't believe the amount of testing a

  • Bah! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    1280 processors and your rig can barely manage 24fps. Lamers
  • clients and the like but when animators waste computer time, animator time, etc they call it out-takes. I mean how much cpu time did it take to do "A good example of this was shown with a simple mock up of Gandalf standing still with Gollum jumping up onto his back and ripping off his head. Most of the actions were done by the computer." or "A blooper that was shown was Gollum playing an electric guitar. Also a few shots were shown with Kermit the frog instead of Gollum. Even after the motion capture is don

  • AI? What AI? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by nobbis ( 99441 ) on Thursday March 13, 2003 @10:56PM (#5508734) Homepage
    I'm a masters student in computer science at Victoria University in Wellington, NZ and went to this seminar. I'm as big a fan of LOTR as the next guy. However, I have this pet gripe. I agree that LOTR is an impressive feat of computer graphics but I'm annoyed by this talk of how MASSIVE is "AI on steroids."

    There is NO AI in MASSIVE. Surely if AI means anything, it means the ability to optimise behaviour, or learn from data, or at least demonstrate adaptation of some sort. There is no adaptation in MASSIVE. Each agent is consulting a list of rules of what to do in a given situation and then executing the specified motion-captured animation. Not only is the motion not generated by the agent, but the rules are just hand-coded by humans. They're not even evolving these "brains."

    The reason that it looks impressive is because instead of using identical, dumb, particle-like agents the agents have pre-programmed decision trees that generate their actions. Great work -- good programming job, but nothing that any hacker couldn't come up with. Show me a single agent in MASSIVE learning to walk or lifting a weapon or producing any movement that wasn't pre-scripted and I'll be impressed.

    In my opinion the cool thing here is the remarkably ability of complex systems to generate interesting global phenomena from locally interacting agents.

    Can someone who knows better please prove me wrong? I'd love to believe this was something more than a trumped up screensaver...
    • So you're saying the agents didn't simulate intelligence artificially? As in, "artificial intelligence?"

      Do we really want orcs with actual real intelligence, who learn halfway through battle how to dig a tunnel and get the hell away from Helm's Deep or not fall down from a charging horse?
    • First off I'll comment on something you said in another followup, because it pretty much sums it up:

      Artificial intelligence does not mean "simulating intelligence artificially."

      Because this is pretty much what AI actually is.

      I recall a comment one of the teachers of a Applied AI course I took said: "The more we learn about AI, the more things we discover that are not AI."

      Now there are projects where robots have learned to walk using AI. It looks like shit however, and is only "cool" if you actually unde

    • Congratulations. You have successfully committed the common mistake of oversimplifcation by failing to note that there are multiple definitions of Aritifical Intelligence.

      Mostly, I'm referring here to the debate over strong AI vs. weak AI [charltonrose.com].
      IMHO, which is not necessarily the same as that expressed in the page I linked to, though it's probably similar,
      strong AI is: Somehow constructing a computer system or robot such that it can truly think in the same manner as a real human being. By constrast,
      weak AI

    • good programming job, but nothing that any hacker couldn't come up with.

      Maybe it's not "real AI" but I still disagree that any hacker could do it. It's even less likely that any hacker could do it fast enough to generate scenes of such complexity in time for the film's release. That ratio of complexity/realism to compute cycles is far beyond what "any hacker" could do, and that's what makes MASSIVE a breakthrough.

    • I am a doctoral student working under the broad umbrella of AI. Because my background is mathematics, I've struggled for years to figure out just what these computer scientists are talking about. My conclusion is that AI means just about anything the speaker wishes.

      One rather crude saying claims that "AI can be broken into two part, statistics and bullshit". I don't care for this assessment, but it makes it clear that even rather pedestrian stuff like decision trees and clever application of Bayes' Rule

  • Weta SETI@home (Score:2, Interesting)

    by vertias ( 646708 )
    Weta Digital is placed 11th on the NZ SETI@home with an average of 4 hours per WUs, but the last WU they completed was in January. They must of finished rending all the scenes for Return of the King.
  • Just like the simpson's, there should be a Jackie Chan reference in each article on /.

    "(This is a digital analog to a technique developed by Jackie Chan, who choreographs onscreen fights by assigning different grunts to his attackers, based on the angle and type of approach; he can "see" them coming, even if his back is turned, based on auditory cues.)"

    Preyy slick. I wonder if Jackie is working on developing his sonar.

    robi
  • Cinefex, the visual effects periodical, Cinefex [cinefex.com] has released two very good issues regarding the VFX for both FOTR (#89, April 2002) and TTT (#92, January 2003).

    Issue 89 has over 40 pages of techy-goodies on the making of FOTR. Most of the article is set up as scene by scene breakdown paired with the technical aspects faced on the show (VFX and SFX). Also has a nice cover of Sam facing the Balrog which looks like it came from the Special Edition DVD.

    Issue 92 has Gollum on the cover (possibly in the Dead

  • Oops! (Score:2)

    by TheSync ( 5291 )
    I thought you meant this WETA Digital [weta.org].

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