Hair, Fur, Lanes, Dynamics and More
Version 3.0 brings dynamic hair and fur capability to Massive now, which is really exciting. The new lanes feature enables artists to lay down directional lanes in terrain very simply. We've also dramatically improved our stunt/dynamics capabilities. Prior to this year, when Massive agents fell down they had to die, once the rigid body dynamics kicked in. In 3.0, you can now transition back from dynamics to kinematics -- so your agents can get violently knocked down to the ground and get back up again and continue their performance.

In the past, people have thought of Massive as an engine for providing motion for background extras, and they fit Massive into their pipelines for that sole purpose. This year we're getting the word out there that Massive can be used throughout the whole process. Your agents don't have to be relegated just to being background extras. We've enhanced our sub D support and integration this year and you can now interactively view sub-D surfaces on hundreds of thousands of agents in the viewport. More and more users are bringing Massive agents close to the camera and having them perform right alongside hero characters.

We've added the much requested support for mental ray, and FBX support for skeletons and motion so you can feed your animation cycles into Massive using any animation package.

Creative Inspiration
What continues to drive us to develop new features for Massive is seeing the new and creative ways customers are using the software. They are the ones who have always raised the bar for us, and this past year has been no exception. People are developing Massive agents for all kinds of creatures -- horses, insects, planes, trains, automobiles, ships - and, of course, those crazy rats in the kitchen that the great Massive team at Pixar gave life to.

Animal Logic utilized Massive to complete hundreds of shots for the Academy Award-winning Happy Feet, giving us a sort of mega Busby Berkeley experience. Director George Miller wanted to ensure that the Massive crowds weren't just filling in the background, but were able to deliver complete performances and, because of environment and terrain demands, performance requirements were set very high. Massive enabled Animal Logic to produce shots comprised of between 50-60 thousand agents, each with their own set of social behaviors.

Animal Logic also used Massive to achieve battle sequences of epic proportions in 300, which combined live-action performances with 3D elements and virtual backgrounds to bring Frank Miller's graphic novel to life. The eight-minute opening battle sequence, originally filmed with about only 30 performers, featured up to 20,000 Persian troops.

Rhythm & Hues used Massive to create thousands of lifelike computer-generated animals for Evan Almighty using Massive in the large establishing shots of hundreds of animals paired two-by-two. Having cut their Massive teeth on Narnia, experts at R&H created more than 269 unique types of animals, both male and female. Some of the shots contained up to 3,800 animals, all of them individual Massive agents.

Live Free or Die Hard found that new restrictions on filming in Washington, D.C. led the filmmakers to Digital Dimension for the evacuation scenes, which had a thousand realistic agents running at different speeds and talking on cell phones. For Night at the Museum, Rhythm & Hues used Massive to populate scenes with 3,000 characters of various types -- all at 1/24th scale. In Bridge to Terabithia, the ever-expert Massive users at Weta Digital used it for a very different sort of crowd scene -- fields of flowers. In a scene at the end of the film, the boy hero introduces his little sister to Terabithia and the world of imagination. Weta used Massive to grow the flowers, control how fast they grew, and how they broke off into discreet clumps, simulating a time-lapse effect.

Digital Dimension employed Massive to convey the story of Custer's last stand in HBO's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. The opening shot of the scene features 500 riders on horseback and 1,500-2,000 people running on foot through hundreds of teepees. This is the first time a studio has used our still-in-development horse agent.

A Massive Future
Facilities such as Digital Domain, Method Studios, The Mill, MPC, Charlex, Asylum, Double Negative, Rainmaker, Smoke & Mirrors, Stargate, Zoic, Framestore and others are making film and commercial shots with Massive a fundamental part of their toolset. Massive is enabling forward thinking artists to realize directors' visions and work more efficiently in spite of ever decreasing casting budgets and production constraints.

In the future, expect to see more of Massive in education, and a larger pool of trained Massive artists bringing their skills to a growing number of effects facilities, design visualization companies and other exciting new markets.

Not since my days at ILM watching dailies of T2 and Jurassic Park have I seen the CG industry deliver such a transformative creative technique for filmmakers. Bringing Massive to the world is a task which we at the company take very seriously, and we will continue to work very hard to get more and more access and information to you, through the new website we launched this week and other means. Since we started the company, some of us are a bit fatter and some of us a little balder, running as fast as we can to keep up with your phone calls and support requests. If we are, in fact, at some kind of "tipping point," we will still endeavor to hold on to the spirit of a small company who really love serving our customers and have lots of fun while doing it.

Diane Holland joined Massive Software as ceo in early 2004 after starting her visual effects and career graphics career in 1989 at ILM where she assisted management in developing the infrastructure necessary for such groundbreaking projects as Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park Among Diane's illustrious career accomplishments are serving as director of operations and then director of marketing for features films at Digital Domain, exec director of marketing for Sony Pictures, vfx producer at Santa Barbara studios, svp of Magnet Interactive and developing an animated feature for Disney.