Digitizing Middle Earth

SAN JOSE, Calif: Crowd animation, digital doubles, Gollum and the Ents. The art and logistics of creating these full-bodied creatures was fleshed out at a general interest keynote at the Game Developers Conference Thursday.

In his keynote, Jon Labrie, former CTO of Weta Digital, Ltd, and founder of mobile-game company Blister, described himself as "someone who has left the business of film making to create interactive games." He also talked about some of the film animation techniques that led Weta Digital to win an Academy Award for work on the first film in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Gollum and other digital creatures

A crowd of over 300 people applauded as scenes from the making of The Two Towers were shown. Digital shots of the early Gollum showed a very different creature from the one seen in the two films. The first animated Gollum seemed to have a rough facial texture, very specifically diseased and with a different voice, unlike the rasping, beseeching tone of the Gollum in the movie.

Modeled on the muscles of a human face, the final Gollum has over 50 parametric controls for the face and over 850 discrete sculptures give it form. "We modeled mutual muscles on the face and there was a subtle control for every muscle in the face. So you can't just say that Gollum is either happy or sad. There are a range of expressions here," said Labrie as an early Gollum animation was manipulated via a range of parameters. "Oh, and behind his ears is the rash you get when you scratch yourself for a 1000 years," he added, pointing out the detail.

Scenes of Gollum on the sets jostling with the hobbits were replayed. The movements of a human mummy figure that was supposed to be Gollum was later matched with those of an animated Gollum. "Gollum was supposed to add some supernatural quality to this sort of movement. To me this seems like a good shot," said Labrie of the shot where Gollum tussles with the hobbit Frodo Baggins.

In the world of animation, few things are more complex that creating entire crowds of living beings. "Even though Gollum is a fascinating creature, he isn't even close to being the most complex creature," said Labrie, while showing screen shots of the earliest fabrications of the Ents. "This took us months and months to visualize, (and) to do."

The final Ents had over 2600 nerve patches and complex software tools to add complexity to the structural dynamics of making a tree move. Said Labrie, "You don't get to read a lot of detail because the basic colors are grey. But these became rigid mechanical bodies standing around and to provide something like this with emotion – ridges and moving eyes, it was a huge challenge."

Aside from creating living beings, the task of creating a complex environment where such agents are allowed to interact in natural ways proved sometimes to be a frustrating experience. A system that encapsulates such a massive world environment appears to require two things: the first being a system that can incorporate such a real-world environment and the second being artificial agents that can interact with such an environment.

An early test showcased the difficulty in letting an agent equipped with the basic behavior of navigating inside of a maze without hitting the walls or falling down. But what happens when the agent encounters a pit and the laws of gravity? It doesn't just tumble down, it falls while twisting its vertebrae and breaking bones in its animated body.

Laughter erupted when early tests of crowd animation appeared. This was an army of a thousand animated creatures, each modeled on the simple behavior, namely to find and abuse guy of the opposite color -- using motion cycle capture techniques to help navigate inside the world environment.

The problem appeared when the guys at the far end of the crowd appeared to start running away, out of the screen area. "Look at the guys at the end of the screen. Someone forgot to include this basic programming tip. If you don't see anybody in front of you, please turn around and go ahead again," said Labrie.

Other peculiar behavior included some agents being slaughtered on the attack field and then getting up to fight again. "I call this the I-have-just-been-blown-up-but-am-not-dead-yet behavior," said Labrie.

The concept of creative iteration

Labrie also went on to explain his concept of 'creative iteration' and how it has informed the development of one of the world's largest digital visual effects infrastructures. "The values I bring here are what I have obtained as an observer of the psychology behind adding technology to a business," he said. Demonstrating the value of a technology-business-art pyramid Labrie elaborated, "This then is our business: The application of technology to create art. On time. On budget."

He continued, "There will always be problems in this business. From people telling you things like we need more storage, we need more of this, or that. But the worst thing according to me is that people can hide behind art. People saying – I'm an artist and creativity takes more time. When you are in this business, you need to forget when people say art, you need to focus on creation. Creation is the fundamental activity – you'll get to art finally. Art is the product, by-product of creation. Therefore, the fundamental nature of creative effort is iteration. Iteration is easily quantified."

Speaking on the future of the gaming industry, Labrie said that since the growth market is for more social and casual games, there is a need to leverage this platform to attract new players. "The unique capability of such a platform would be ubiquitous connectivity. The thing is that social/casual gamers don't really play these games much. Yet, they want more than just games. Ubiquitous connectivity [I feel] is a step towards that."

Copyright © 2003 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in ExtremeTech.