Individualisation

[Ithaskar Fëarindel]

I know I keep going on about LOTR - but there is something very similar in Twin Towers which looks like the sorta stuff CA are doing. In TT a whole program was made up to give life to the thousands of sprites in the battles. Each sprite has his own individuality - ie when the two armies run at each other, one might throw his sword behind his head - then when the two armies meet, each sprite makes his own choices on how to fight.

I thought this would need some massive PC to accomplish until I remembered STW. The two are the same. Each sprite doing his own individual actions. In STW it's calculated for up to 15360 sprites - LOTR will accomplish the same effect for maybe 10 times as many in one fight - though they can dedicate the program to just this.

What would be interesting - nd perhaps devastating to CA - is if they actually decided to sell or even use the program to make their own games. It was made specifically for the film, but such a program would be a great basis for a game. Maybe even CA themselves can look at this and compare notes http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif

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Fëa-Quendi

[mizuYari]

Difference is in the real-time, vs non-real-time. I dont know how LOTR did it, but I suspect that each frame is rendered individually. Doesn't matter how long it takes to render a frame, they just put the frame sequence together and play back.

In STW, the frames has to be rendered in a short period of time. If it takes a minute to render a frame, player would cry "major lag" and quit. http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/wink.gif

Linh

[DarknScaly]

You mean "Battle"?

The cgi program they used for the Uruk-hai at helms deep, Pellenor Fields and the initial scenes at Mordor?

Whats "interesting" is that it uses 3d models... surely the logical move forward from sprites (all going to need bigger PCs i think)

It all motion-captured though isnt it? They placed a range of motion captured scenes into it from which it assigns a "randomised" set of moves to each individual. So it looks like they are are all walking individually but a lot of it is actually just similar movement running at a different frame. And for each and every troop type they have to add a new mocap series (or 30).

Its certainly impressive though and i'd love to se it as the basis for a game as the movements it generates are superb - i wonder how hard it is on processor though...

[Erado the Black]

Guys,

rendering for movies is a bit different than for in-game graphics. At the office we do some rendering of our highway designs. We have a network rendering of 15 pc's that all work together on it.

For Titanic they used 256 Risc Alhpa Dec's connected to each other. I don't know what they used for LOTR, but it must have been massive. Think of one pc taking care of rendering maybe no more than 10 Uruk Hai's, so for a 1000 Uruk Hai they would have 100 dedicated pcs all connected together, and one rendering control server to merge all the data it received from the 100 rendering machines.

Something like that, I don't know the current state of these technologies.

[Kraellin]

erado's right. it still takes a VERY large number of machines to do those high-end movies. 'jurassic park I' took a room full of computers to do all those dinosaur renderings and they could only get so many on screen at one time. by the time they did 'jurassic III' it still took a room full of computers but the technology had advanced to where they could put more images on screen, but it still took a room full of computers to do it. same with 'star wars'.

arent these also more or less fixed animations without user controlled movement? in other words, arent they scripted and the scripts are fixed, not dynamic?

doesnt lucas arts and maybe even industrial light and magic, put out some computer games? or maybe it's just lucas arts that licenses them and someone else is producing them. not sure.

it's often more interesting to watch how they made a particular movie than to watch the movie itself.

K.


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The only absolute is that there are no absolutes.

[This message has been edited by Kraellin (edited 08-09-2002).]

[Hirosito]

lol how true

[MrBeAr]

I read something about ATI making a plugin for Maya for use with the new r300 based firegl card. At sigraph they supposedly rendered lord of the rings at 50 fps. Does anybody have some more details on this?

[Papewaio]

You could run a battle recorder like STW then you go and up the images with 3D models after the fact etc.

Massive amounts of computers were required to do this.

Anyhow before I start rambling this is going to OT.