Massive Software Adoption Increases Among Established and Boutique VFX Facilities

Massive Prime Helps Companies Increase 3D Animation Capabilities and ROI

Thursday 7 December 2006

Massive Software, the leading developer of artificial life–based 3D animation systems, announced today multiple customer wins across visual effects, animation and post–production houses from London to Los Angeles to India. More and more companies are discovering that epic levels of CG animation can be created with limited resources, and many of them are achieving this with the out–of–the–box functionality of Massive.

These companies represent a new wave of facilities that are adopting Massive products across everything from mid–to–large–sized studios to emerging boutique post houses. Massive is proud to announce some of the newest adopters of Massive around the world: Pixar, Animationsfabrik (Germany), Armstrong White (Chicago), Asylum FX (Santa Monica), Attitude Studios (Paris), Below the Radar (LA), Black Ginger (South Africa), CFC Framestore (London), Charlex (New York), Circles and Lines (Germany), Digital Dimension (Burbank & Montreal), Double Negative (London), Duboi (Paris), El Ranchito (Madrid, Spain), Emerald City VFX (Sydney), Euphonic (Tokyo), Leader (Taiwan), Links Digiworks (Tokyo), Method (Santa Monica), Motionblur (Norway), Rainmaker (Vancouver, BC), Rushes (London), Smoke & Mirrors (London), Stargate Digital (LA), Studio Linda (Tokyo), Tata Elxsi (India), Zoic Studios (LA), and many others.

Using Massive with pre–built Ready–to–Run agents provides a particularly fast and easy workflow for building large scenes, such as arena crowds. Customers can also render Massive scenes in their existing pipelines using Massive's new Velocity renderer and hardware acceleration on the GPU.

Digital Dimension, based in Burbank, California, with facilities in Montreal, Canada, recently used Massive and Massive's Ready–to–Run Spectator Agent to produce digital 3D crowd scenes with up to 10,000 characters per shot for its work on the feature film "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby." Most recently, they were able to use Massive to create a 45–second shot looking down onto crowds at a street fair for Paramount's upcoming feature, "Charlotte's Web." The Massive shot for the film was so convincing that Digital Dimension was awarded a New York City crowd shot on a film project for HBO and also plans to use Massive in shots for "Die Hard 4."

"Massive is very modular by nature and its tools provide a lot of flexibility in creating the exact crowd shot that a project demands," says Justin Mitchell, Sr. Technical Director. "Massive was the only software available to allow us to achieve the scale and believability of a crowd shot featuring such a broad range of actors – from children carrying balloons to women in billowing skirts. Our client was thrilled."

With over 25 years in the post production industry, the U.K.–based Rushes is one of the world's leading visual effects and post facilities. Rushes houses the most comprehensive lineup of top–end post production technology in London, with an emphasis on cutting–edge working practices and new technologies.

"I was placing and tweaking agents in a scene after only about 15 minutes with Massive," said Andy Hargreaves, 3D Artist, Rushes. "You have a huge range of animation presets together with ambient motions and smooth transitions in between. In a short amount time, you can produce literally thousands of unique, realistically animated, fully textured characters. It's simply a case of understanding how the agent's brain and behavior patterns work and then controlling them and triggering them as desired."

Santa Monica–based digital production shop Below the Radar recently employed Massive and Massive's Ready–to–Run Stadium Crowd Agent to produce crowd scenes for commercials for Miller Lite and T–Mobile for the World Soccer Cup. Integrating Massive into the boutique's existing pipeline was seamless, and the fuzzy logic built into the software made crowd scenes incredibly realistic.

"We chose Massive software because there is nothing else like it. Massive is a lot easier to learn to use than people think, and it allows us to be more competitive without breaking the bank," says Ricardo Torres, VFX Creative Director for Below The Radar. "Crowd replications are very common in the commercial world, and being able to tell directors they don't have to waste two days moving extras around to fill a stadium is a major advantage for our FX boutique. Massive is saving us tons of compositing time and saving the production companies tons of money."