Rhythm & Hues adopted Massive last year to support the company¹s 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.”
“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.