Lo all,
I was watching the behind the scenes of LOTR the other day and I heard someone on there talking about Massive, a crowd simulator used in LOTR. I looked around and finally, after about an hour or searching, I found this… http://www.massivesoftware.com/massive.html very interesting by the looks of it. but go to the FAQ and read how much they’re gonna sell it for… $40k!!! Thats one hell of a lotta money.
$40K!!! And I thought Maya was expensive. Those LOTR people sure got a good deal if they got a free chance to Beta test it.
Goo
I think it was written in-house because the other commercial 3d software couldn’t do what Massive does. It’ll come down in price if enough people buy it.
Well, from what I understand WETA (the production team who worked on LOTR) made it specifically for LOTR, and that Massive application is something different.
Also from what I understand, what WETA made was just a little application which they could import models into, and then simulate an army by giving each model its own thought processes, and they moved as a whole controlled like Craig W. Reynolds Boids which simulates flocking, with added thought processes like “attack” and “defend” added.
Quite simple really, and I think its outrageous anyone can ask 40k for something like that, heck, if I could program I’d take a stab at making my own version of it.
it is the same application. If you look under the News section, it tells about how Massive was used for Helm’s Deep and what not. http://www.cgchannel.com/news/showfeature.jsp?newsid=717&pid=5
if you look there, it will tell you more info about how massive fits into LOTR.
As long as I understand WETA doesn’t own Massive. The guy that programed Liquid (a Maya to RenderMan translator also used by WETA) aclared this at the RenderMan newsgroup.
According to the Extended DVD of LOTR they hired this programmer to code for them and the results was Massive. Unless I’m mistaken. I watched it once (everything) and was impressed with how they did it all.
i can understand that they will ask 40K for it.
hey if a big shot director wants a masssive battle he will go look for something.
he can either buy the 40k program/plugin what not to do it.
or hire a team of programmers to make it.
he’s a director he has no clue as to what a computer does except how to make letter bold in MSWord.
he will go for the 40k program 
40k is relatively inexpensive considering the film budgets of movies these days. Spending 200 million$ on a movie production is not uncommon. That’s .02 % of the budget.
Well… I would think $40k would be worth it, if you absolutely must need such a project, and that one fits for you. Not only that, but you could use it for more than one project… a studio would buy it, and could use it for several movies (depending on the license agreement, you may have to work on the cosecutively, rather than concurrently).
How many man-hours would it take to develop that program, start to finish? Well… first you have to consider the hardware and office space. But say it would take 2 guys 6 months. Now you pay these guys just $40k per year. That’s $40k in salary total for the two. Now you have to add 6%, that’s $2400. Beyond that, the business is responsible for paying several other fees to the government in order to employ them… unemployment tax and others, some depend on which state you are in. There are also benefits to consider… medical, dental, etc. Most people don’t realize that it is much more expensive to employ someone than just the wages that are paid. Those two guys for 6 months, will all the associated costs and fees imposed by the governments could easily reach $60k, even though the salary is only $40k. But then, for the level of experience you’d want, $40k a year seems low… so it’d probably cost even more.
Imp
Ok, then you want to pay the development cost with just the first sale?
Like has been said before… how many sales you think there will be? You should also consider it most likely has very special terms. Likely an unlimited site or organization license, perhaps even source code, and permission to alter it for their needs. Then keep going, and try to figure out the actual development costs… most likely much more than $40k.
$40k certainly isn’t the most ever paid for software… it is obvious they’re marketing to very large organizations… movie studios and large graphics houses. Let’s just say a large studio has 5 guys using the software working on a movie, and maybe two similar projects going on at once. That’s 10 users… at $40k, that’s only $4k per user.
The US Navy has likely made a similar purchase. I’d imagine they paid Microsoft several million dollars for their license of MS Office, which I think is an organization wide license for the whole Navy and probably Marine Corps (The Marine Corp is a part of the Department of the Navy).
Without a special deal, buying MS Office at around $500 per single-user license for 80 employees would cost $40K.
Imp