The Massive software, which helped create the massive crowd scenes in The Lord of the Rings, was one of the many topics addressed at the UK CGI Festival.

There have been many attempts over the years to get a serious CG conference and exhibition off the ground in London. The fact that none of them has succeeded in the long term is a bit of a puzzle, really. After all, London is one of the global epicenters of excellence when it comes to the digital visual arts, with a goodly percentage of the best vfx work in all fields emanating from the cramped streets of Soho. And beyond the capital, the depth of talent in the U.K. games industry is truly wondrous to behold.

Maybe people are too wedded to their trips to Amsterdam for IBC, and Stateside for NAB, SIGGRAPH and the GDC to want a top-rank show on their doorstep curtailing all that lovely expense-account travel. Maybe no one yet has managed to come up with the right mix of big-name speakers and new, must-see technology to bring the punters in through the door. Maybe everyone’s just too busy when it comes to it. Whatever, all recent attempts have fallen on some pretty stony ground.

The UK CGI Festival, though, on the evidence of its inaugural event earlier in December, has a better chance than most of escaping the culls and prospering into the future. Yes, the vibes from the Leeds leg of the event in November were disappointing. (Leeds is a couple of hundred miles to the north, and thus to Europeans a long way away). And, yes, exhibitors moaned in London about the ratio of students vs. facility heads with purchase orders in their hands, but when don’t they? And, yes, the London exhibition was fairly small and insubstantial. But attendance was fairly good, the conference sessions had a discernable number of warm bodies in them (a couple were genuinely packed) and there was some fascinating stuff to offer.

One of the more interesting things to note was how often the subject of crowd replication and behavior came up, with most of the speakers from the vfx end of the spectrum mentioning it at least somewhere in their presentation. As The Mill’s Jordi Bares put it, “You get one film going out with crowds in and suddenly everyone wants crowds.” Naturally enough, however, it was very much to the forefront when Stephen Regelous, writer of the Massive software that steered so many orcs to gory deaths in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, hosted a masterclass in “Artificial Life for Animation.”

Regelous — who committed the unfortunate though very Kiwi sin of having an attractive woman on his stand with the company name emblazoned across her chest — is an affable chap with an impressive showreel. He’s also entertainingly clumsy at using his own software at times, but no amount of “Ooops, I didn’t mean to do that” moments can hide the power of Massive. Beyond showcasing the software itself and making reassuring noises that the motion tree design tool is nowhere near as complex as it looks once you start tackling it, Regelous also showed the first entrants in the ready to run agents library introduced at SIGGRAPH: Loco Guy, Stadium Guy and Ambient Man. The promise is that more are on the way for 2005, as will be the realtime animation tool Massive Live.

In a complimentary vain, Natural Motion ceo, Torsten Reil, demo-ed his company’s highly impressive endorphin package and talked the audience through its development. The software originated at Oxford University, where researchers were attempting to get stick figures to walk using a combination of neural networks and physics simulation. Fast forward a few years, add in some biomechanics and other things and you’ve got endorphin, which is the sort of software that has animators shaking their heads in disbelief when they see it run in front of them.

Natural Motion grandly calls what it does Dynamic Motion Synthesis, but it’s essentially a mix of biomechanical data coupled with adaptive AI behaviours. Push a 3D character down the 3D stairs, and the animator can set him up to first try to keep his balance, then curl to protect his head and ribs, then relax at the end as if losing consciousness. The result is very convincing animation in very quick time all ready for export to Maya, XSI or wherever. And with the introduction of background dynamic retargeting, more behaviors and the company working on what it calls signature extraction — being able to distill the essence of a movement out of MoCap data and use it as a dynamic asset — the future’s looking bright. “Soon,” concluded Reil, “an animator will only need a few seed assets to create all their animation needs.”