Smart soldiers decided to flee the Rings battle

Canada.com ^ | December 15, 2003 | JAMIE PORTMAN

[Prodigal Son]

Digital warriors thought for themselves - and their first thought was to run away

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It's the greatest and most spectacular battle in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

But filmmakers faced one surprising challenge - how to keep the computer-generated soldiers from fleeing the battlefield.

Director Peter Jackson had laid down his requirements for the Battle of Pelennor Fields - the climactic engagement in The Return of the King in which the heroic defenders of Middle-Earth face the overwhelming might of Sauron and his armies of Darkness. Jackson wanted the computer-generated antagonists to have absolute authenticity on the big screen and to be indistinguishable from the real actors.

Computer wizards responded brilliantly, not only with Sauron's swarming armies but with such additional lethal adversaries as the massive winged Fell Beasts and the giant elephant-like Mumakil. The next step was to ensure that the confrontation itself have detail and authenticity.

"I want battles like nothing anyone has ever seen on screen," Jackson said. I want every soldier fighting for himself - you have to come up with something."

Special effects designer Richard Taylor says this led to the writing of a "massive" principal code for the battle to give more than 200,000 digitized soldiers and some 6,000 horses distinctiveness and individuality.

"So to create these individual agents, there was a code that was especially written and developed," Taylor says, adding that it was like being involved in a living work of science fiction.

"It was the fact that you could get a computer to think for itself, that you could get 200,000 agents within the computer to think for themselves.

"So each of these computerized soldiers is assessing the environment around them, drawing on a repertoire of military moves that have been taught them through motion capture - determining how they will combat the enemy, step over the terrain, deal with obstacles in front of them through their own intelligence - and there's 200,000 of them doing that."

Basically, all the necessary information for decision-making was fed into this network of computers without determining for them whether they would win or lose.

But this attempt to ensure that they acted spontaneously almost sabotaged the the battleground sequences.

"For the first two years, the biggest problem we had was soldiers fleeing the field of battle," Taylor said.

"We could not make their computers stupid enough to not run away."

So some extra computer tinkering was required to ensure that the trilogy's climactic battle worked the way Jackson wanted.

[Prodigal Son]

I thought the LOTR fans might be interested in this.

[RedBloodedAmerican]

Jackson's mistake? The modeling software was "Made In France".

[HarleyD]

That explains the "fleeing". :O)

[ecurbh]

Ring Ping!!

There and Back Again: The Journeys of Flat Frodo

Anyone wishing to be added to or removed from the Ring-Ping list, please don't hesitate to let me know.

[Thud]

The extended Two Towers "making of" said the problem was that the CGI "agents" representing individual soldiers were programmed to run in the direction they were facing when they first appeared, in search of enemies to fight, if they could not initially see any enemies. And the ones who appeared in the rear ranks couldn't see any enemies. Those whose first appearance had them facing to the rear ran in that direction. Those in the rear ranks who faced to the flank ran to the flanks until they could see enemies. Those who faced to the front couldn't move forward, and so didn't move at all until the whole line shuffled forward.

I imagine they solved the problem by having the "agents" first appearance have them all facing in the same direction.

[Mudboy Slim]

"Jackson's mistake? The modeling software was "Made In France"."

ROFLMAO...MUD