Massive was originally developed for use in Peter Jackson’s The Lord Of The Rings film trilogy. Subsequently, the company Massive Software was created to bring this technology to film and television productions around the world. Since then Massive has become the leading software for crowd-related visual effects and autonomous character animation.
Massive Prime ™
Feature Comparison
Academy Award-winning Massive Prime™ is the complete solution for authoring, directing, and rendering custom autonomous agents for animation and visual effects
Massive is the world’s most sophisticated crowd simulation software for rapidly creating realistic crowd scenes. In many cases, our Ready To Run Agents™ together with Massive for Maya or Massive for Max is the ideal solution for creating crowds. But when a shot calls for agents to perform custom motion or behaviors, then choose Massive Prime.
Massive’s products are also gaining momentum in games – with the unique crowd tools being used to populate cutscenes with bigger, more realistic, and dynamic crowds. High-profile games studios using Massive can be found in Asia and in North America, and these projects have featured on both the XBOX 360 and Nintendo Wii platforms.
With the introduction of products aimed specifically at smaller studios and the rapid turnaround of shots, Massive has dominated its area in the film and television industries. Due both to its flexible design and to the boundless imagination of the creative Massive customers who have adopted it, Massive has shown that it is more than just the crowd tool it was originally created as. Anything is possible; from a handful of insects to a vast and chaotic battleground, Massive does it all.
Architectural Visualization
Architectural and engineering visualizations require realistic CG people to bring imagery to life. Massive provides the industry’s most advanced solution for populating visualizations. Using just one license of Massive Jet™ and some Ready To Run Agents™ such as Ambient Agent™ or Locomotion Agent™ any project can become a bustling environment filled with hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of photorealistic moving people.
Massive Jet™
Massive Jet™ is a cost-effective and efficient solution for populating large scenes. Typically visualization projects don’t require custom brain building or other deeper aspects of Massive, so the simpler and more affordable Massive Jet is perfectly suitable for the task. It comes complete with Massive’s unique renderer plugins facilitating the efficient rendering of huge numbers of photorealistic people and features all the same customization potential for agent clothing, shading, lighting, etc.
Ready To Run Agents™
Massive’s Ready To Run Agents™ are complete with variations of geometry, texture maps, and motion. Each agent comes with around 100 or more high-quality motion-captured actions, captured at some of the world’s top motion capture studios. Right out of the box the agents are able to avoid collisions with each other and are able to follow Flow Fields and Lanes so that directing them is a breeze requiring absolutely no scripting or programming.
Integration.
Massive can work right alongside other 3D apps used in Visualisation. Thanks to Massive’s comprehensive FBX importing it’s easy to get buildings, terrain, cameras, and even lights into Massive from 3DS Max, Cinema 4D, and any other application that support FBX. If working with Maya, scenes can be directly imported from Maya Ascii files.
Once the geometry has been imported into Massive it’s just a matter of placing the agents in the scene using Massive’s convenient Place Tool. Agents can easily be directed around the environment via Flow Fields and Lanes.
Rendering
Massive supports a range of top renderers used in Visualisation such as V-Ray, Arnold, Mental Ray, 3Delight, Air, and Pixar’s RenderMan. Rendering tens of thousands of photorealistic people in a single pass is made possible using our renderer plugins
Massive Insight™
“Massive Insight™ has a flexible AI–authoring environment for modeling the idiosyncrasies of complex, real-life behaviors into agents who use visual and auditory cues, as we do in real life.”
Simulation and visualization for the real world: Architecture, civil engineering, pedestrian planning, transportation, life safety, life science – and much more.
When it comes to 3D visualization, architects, engineers, and designers are experiencing a new level of expectation from their clients and other stakeholders in the design and build process. It used to be enough to have a good quality, albeit static, 3D visualization. But today stakeholders increasingly expect to see dynamic scenes, with people moving in a realistic way, plants and trees swaying in the breeze, or vehicles dropping off passengers.
It is no longer enough to simply bring visualizations to life. To gain the greatest value, all stakeholders need to know that their visualizations are accurate, that that they can rely on them to prove that a given space will perform as intended.
Massive Insight meets these goals by bringing movie-quality animation within easy reach of every architect while satisfying the demands of engineers for a very high degree of behavior and motion fidelity. We have achieved this through the combination of our unique artificial intelligence-based agent technology and our unrivaled pedigree in the world of entertainment and media.
One key differentiating characteristic of Massive is that it employs an Artificial Life approach to AI. Artificial Life technology draws from the processes of nature rather than traditional simulation methodologies, providing for more inherently natural behavior than those seen in existing engineering solutions. Massive Agents act on their own behalf using the simulated natural senses of sight, hearing, and touch.
