Massive Software celebrates 10th Birthday

24 May 2012

Massive Software was founded in 2002 and today we celebrated the 10th anniversary of the beginning of our company. During that time our software has been used on hundreds of projects including many major feature films. Along the way we received an Academy Award for contributing to the filmmaking process, and we made many friends. Thanks to all of our users who have helped Massive to become something special. We hope to continue contributing to filmmaking, visual effects and animation for many years to come.

New Ready To Run Car agent

21 September 2011

The new Massive Ready To Run car agent is now available. The car agent has a variety of body shapes, grille and light designs, colour schemes and even includes a driver able to turn the steering wheel with his hands. The agent is able to respond to traffic lights, overtake, and avoid collisions by vision. It uses the Massive Lanes technology to navigate the scene, which provides a simple means for integration with cities, roads, motorways etc.

Digital Domain creates half a million programs using Massive

3 January 2011

For Tron Legacy Digital Domain created hundreds of shots of stunning 3D visual effects, including a coliseum scene with half a million Massive agents. From the January edition of Cinefex magazine, "The coliseum featured a crowd of 500,000 cheering, jumping and yelling spectator programs in the background, realized through a Massive simulation. "There were 70 or 80 agents, with different levels of activity, sizes, shapes, clothes and so forth, just so we'd see some variation in the background. We needed a lot of activity to fill that coliseum background with energy and life."

The Mill sends Massive agents into battle for Merlin

Tuesday 21 December 2010

The Massive Combat Sword agent saw plenty of action recently, appearing in three episodes of season 3 of BBC Merlin TV series. The Mill created epic shots of up to 40,000 characters using a modified version of the off-the-shelf Combat Sword agent. In some of the shots two armies of 4000 to 5000 troops collide in battle. According to The Mill regarding a shot in episode 2 "One of the most challenging shots, here the two armies finally collide. The camera is static and the shot relatively close, so it really shows off the automatic combat behaviour of the sword/shield agent. We used a similar approach of terrain colouring, lanes, flow field and invisible collider agents to guide the densely packed formation through the tight gates and boundaries, then to split to two frontlines… Once the agents were near enough to each other all we had to do was let them do their thing and hack eachother to pieces."

The Mill showing once again that epic film scale visual effects can be achieved for television production.

Write The Future

The most successful viral ad campaign ever launched

Thursday 27 July 2010

World class visual effects studio The Mill took their pioneering use of Massive to the next level for the epic 3 minute Nike ' Write the Future' spot. Directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (21 Grams, Babel), with DP Emmanuel Lubezki (Children of Men), the ad takes people on a journey that dramatically captures that one moment when headlines are written from a single pass, or one strike can bring a nation eternal happiness, while bringing others to their knees. Containing 236 VFX shots, more than 110 Massive shots, the visual effects work was completed in just four weeks. The Mill's Tom Bussell: "On the set, I was a bit nervous about the number of Massive shots planned. So I took lots of video of extras they employed as crowds. In the end we didn't use one single crowd plate - every crowd shot is CG".

'Write the Future' features Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney, Didier Drogba, Fabio Cannavaro, Franck Ribery, Cesc Fabregas, Andres Iniesta, Theo Walcott, Landon Donovan, Kobe Bryant and Homer Simpson and is the most successful viral ad campaign ever launched.

Massive 4.0, Supporting V–Ray Rendering, is Now Available

Academy Award winning 3D Animation Software for AI–Driven Characters Now Includes Enhanced Agent Fields, New Terrain Nodes and More

Thursday 18 February 2010

Massive Software, developer of the Academy Award®–winning 3D animation software for AI–driven characters, has released Massive 4.0. The latest release includes support for popular V-Ray rendering, new terrain nodes, enhanced brain nodes and agent fields, and many more features and improvements.

Massive allows artists to create and direct anything from CG humanoids to birds, animals, cars and more to deliver realistic and emotive virtual performances. Massive "agents" are 3D characters that use sight, sound and touch to interpret and react autonomously to the world around them. Massive incorporates procedural animation and AI, and is used by professionals in animation, visual effects and design visualization.

"Massive 4.0 is a major release that brings both creative and pipeline flexibility to artists and studios, and fulfills a number of enhancement requests from the Massive community," said Massive Founder and CTO Stephen Regelous. "We’ve added Terrain nodes, V–Ray support, Python GUI support, Hair/Fur clumping, deep shadow maps, better placement for stadiums, and many other improvements."

Feature Highlights in Massive 4.0

Terrain Nodes – Use an unlimited number of .obj files for terrain geometry; not only for the ground on which Agents walk, but also for walls of buildings, render–only geometry, collision–only geometry and other special purposes.

V–Ray Rendering – Supports this popular renderer, ideal for scenes requiring highly realistic lighting, in the same highly–efficient manner as RenderMan, 3Delight, Air and Mental Ray. Massive generates .vrscene files for the main render files, and for the terrain and agent archive files. It also automatically generates shader dialog parameters for V–Ray material plug–ins and V–Ray materials, giving users complete freedom to assign any available default or custom plug–ins and materials.

Enhanced Agent Fields and Variables – It is now possible to vary each Agent’s response to Agent Fields individually using scale and offset parameters such as distance or color. A new plus button in the variables tab makes it easier and more convenient to handle large numbers of Agent/Group variables.
Place Tools – Stadium placement is even easier with the addition of rows and columns to the polygon generator, which allow for locators to be placed in rows and columns in any shape. The polygon generator also offers a handy stagger parameter, which can be used to offset rows laterally.

Hair and Fur Enhancements – Use Deep Shadow Maps to realistically render longer hair and fur and generate high quality self–shadowing; and Hair/Fur Clumping to generate messy, lumpy, or even wet hair or fur.

Brain Node Improvements – Control delay time and filter width in the output node with other nodes in the brain, using new options to select between "latch," "delay," and "filter" as destinations for alternative inputs. To simplify multiple inputs to an input node, a new feature adds values together.

Read more…

Avatar, Weta Digital & Massive Plants

Wednesday 20 January 2010

James Cameron’s Avatar is the talk of the moment! Here at Massive we are especially proud of the work that Weta Digital have spent the past three years. Massive was used to create the crowds of creatures, humans and in a world first to fill the jungles with plants and trees. Congratulations to Weta Digital for once again taking Massive where no one else has. For more information about Weta Digital's work on the film, including a whole section on the Massive plants and trees, head over to CG Society.