Programs
MASSIVE was the name of a computer program developed by WETA to create automatic battle sequences rather than individually animate every soldier. Stephen Regelous developed the system in 1996, originally to create crowd scenes in King Kong. The system creates a large number of choices for each software agent to pick when inside a digital arena. Catherine Thiel provided the movements of each type of soldier, like the unique fighting styles (designed by Tony Wolf) or fleeing. To add to this, digital environments would also be created for the simulations. Massive also features Grunt, a memory-conservative special purpose renderer, which was used for scenes containing as much as 200,000 agents and several million polygons. The Pelennor Fields scene also contains "multi-body agents" in the form of a 5 × 5 grid of Orcs.
Whilst Jackson insisted on generally using miniatures, sometimes shots would get too difficult for that, primarily with the digital characters. Sometimes natural elements like cloud, dust, fire (which was used as the electronic data for the Wraithworld scenes and the Balrog) would be composited, and natural environments were composited to create the Pelennor Fields. To give a "painterly" look to the films, cinematographer Peter Doyle worked on every scene within the computer to strengthen colours and add extra mood and tone to the proceedings. Gold was tinted to Hobbiton, whilst cooler colours were strengthened into Lothlórien, Moria and Helm's Deep. Such a technique took 2–3 weeks to do, and allowed some freedom with the digital source for some extra editing.
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King required the help of the company Next Limit Technologies and their software RealFlow to simulate the lava in Mount Doom.
A technical overview of the special effect is given by Matt Aitken et al. (2004).
Read more about this topic: Special Effects Of The Lord Of The Rings Film Trilogy
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