Rhythm & Hues uses Massive’s "Smart Stunts™" for Elektra Visual Effects

Team of Two Artists Easily Creates Sequence with Hundreds of CG Snakes By Tapping into the Power and Flexibility of Massive’s New "Smart Stunts™"

Thursday 10 February 2005

Massive Software, developer of the Academy Award–winning 3D animation system for AI–driven crowd–related effects, announced the use of Massive by Rhythm & Hues for the motion picture Elektra (20th Century Fox). Maximizing the software’s new built–in "Smart Stunts", a team of two at the leading visual effects studio – Massive Supervisor Dan Smiczek together with Technical Animator Marc Bryant – applied the software’s unique flexibility for animating large groups of characters or creatures to create a complex scene involving hundreds of CG snakes.

Rhythm & Hues adopted Massive last year to support the company’s considerable principal effects efforts for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, now in production for a December 2005 release. "Massive has become an important tool for us at our facility," said Richard Hollander, President of Rhythm & Hues’ Film Division. "It helped artists set a new bar for The Lord of the Rings movies, but it is now clearly an application that is providing wide–ranging capabilities for the motion picture industry."

When a sequence envisioning several hundred snakes writhing on the ground came up in Elektra, Dan Smiczek quickly realized the broader applicability of Massive and some of its new feature sets for this very different challenge: "We were working with Massive on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when a rumor came through R&H about a sequence in Elektra that had these piles of squirming snakes. We rapidly prototyped a test that gave us favorable results."

"In addition to human stunts, Massive gives us completely arbitrary, non–human–specific skeletons and the ability to animate a large number of things interacting realistically," he continued.

The project marks the film industry’s first use of Massive Smart Stunts™, a technology developed for digital stunts in The Lord of the Rings, and recently enhanced in the commercial product. In Elektra, the snakes are animated procedurally inside Massive while also being influenced by gravity, inertia, forces and collisions. "Previously, more work was required to get the agents to perform in character during dynamics," said Massive creator Stephen Regelous. "When we developed Smart Stunts™, we did further R&D on controlling dynamic agents, took the results of that and put it into the code. This makes it easier and faster for the artist to use."

"Massive Software has done a great job working with us as a customer, providing training, tutorials, getting us production–ready new features and even delivering a new dynamics engine to speed our SIM times," Smiczek stated. "I’ve always envisioned that the great Massive work in The Lord of the Rings movies was the beginning of a new era in visual effects. There are so many different things you can do in Massive, and Smart Stunts™ makes the package even more capable."

"The key to making this sequence look real," said Mike O’Neal, the digital supervisor on Elektra, "was our ability to simulate snakes pushing against each other and falling with gravity, layered under their overall animation goal. Smart Stunt technology made this possible."

Companies using Massive can tap into a range of benefits, including the software’s Ready–to–Run Agents™, cloth simulation, real–time animation tool, and, now, Smart Stunts™, all wrapped into one Massive license. More and more, studios purchasing Massive for completion of a specific large crowd sequence are finding it well suited to a variety of other visual effects needs. Once in house, the software is being cross–purposed as a tool on scenes that may not have thousands of characters, but have more than artists would like to animate via key frame or motion capture methods.

About Rhythm & Hues

Rhythm & Hues’ Film Division is a preeminent producer of quality visual effects and character animation, with a track record of more than 100 feature films. In 1995, the studio was recognized with an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects for its work on Babe. Rhythm & Hues has recently contributed to a wide range of Hollywood releases, including Flight of the Phoenix, Friday Night Lights, The Chronicles of Riddick and Garfield. Upcoming productions include: The Ring 2, The Longest Yard, Serenity, The Interpreter and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and Wardrobe.

Massive Software, Ready–to–Run Agents™ and Smart Stunts™ are trademarks of Massive. Academy Award is a trade or servicemark of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.