Siggraph

Massive Software continues to increase the speed and ease with which epic levels of 3D animation can be produced for film and television with an array of innovations for its line of artificial life-based 3D animation products. The advancements, on display from the Massive Software Booth #1023 at SIGGRAPH 2006, are highlighted by the shipping of Massive 2.6, a major release of the software.

Version 2.6 builds on Massive’s Academy Award-winning technology, providing increased pipeline flexibility, expanded rendering options and smarter agents that allow studios of any size and scope to create highly realistic and emotive performances using autonomously responding characters. Key features of the Massive 2.6 release include:

• Fast and efficient rendering on the GPU - The new integrated Velocity renderer is able to render epic shots at film quality up to 30 times faster than supported software renderers. Massive 2.6 also lets customers use their own custom shaders.




• Render Passes enables flexible pipeline integration - Now Massive agents can be assigned render attributes and shader visibility on a per-render basis, allowing customization of how Massive handles render attributes such as ambient occlusion, shadow pass, depth pass, etc. While providing enhanced integration into the most sophisticated pipelines, Render Passes is also designed to be simple to use.




• More detailed characters - Support for sub-division geometry allows higher-quality geometry so that characters close to the camera can be rendered in greater detail.




• Smarter Agents - Enhancements to Massive Smart Stunts expand what’s possible in a digital stunt. Artists can now create “hybrid stunts” with increased realism by applying Smarts Stunts to specific parts of a Massive agent. With the new grab constraint agents can grab objects, other agents and even climb rope.

“Our goal is to give customers the ability to create characters and shots quickly and easily, and within the scope of their resources,” said Diane Holland, CEO, Massive Software. “In addition to being able to do more detailed characters and use them closer to camera, users of Massive 2.6 will enjoy a greater amount of flexibility and freedom for rendering their Massive scenes.”

“Massive is a desirable solution as the number of characters in our projects increase,” said Mark Thielen, Massive Crowd Animation Supervisor, “The Ant Bully,” and a beta tester of Massive 2.6. “We were able to use the features in Version 2.6 to efficiently produce thousands of autonomously responding digital characters at high quality.”

At SIGGRAPH 2006, Massive is also expanding its Ready-to-Run Massive Agent Library with mayhem and ambient agents. Ready-to-Run Agents make it easy to almost immediately simulate scenes with characters pre-built with all of the attributes needed for locomotion, combat, spectators and other typical crowd scenarios.

Massive products include Massive Prime, the complete solution for interactively authoring, directing and rendering unique AI-enabled characters with an artist-friendly, node-based interface and no programming; and Massive Jet, offering a streamlined workflow for producing scenes using AI-enabled agents from Massive’s Ready-to-Run Library or those created in Massive Prime. See Massive products from Booth #1023 at SIGGRAPH 2006. For further details, visit www.massivesoftware.com.