Awards & Winners

Stephen Regelous

Stephen Regelous is a pioneering computer graphics software engineer from New Zealand. He is best known as the creator of the Massive simulation system that generated the battle scenes of the Peter Jackson movie trilogy The Lord of the Rings. In 2004, Regelous received an Academy Award for Scientific and Engineering Achievement. He is the founder of the company Massive Software. Prior to working on Lord of the Rings, Regelous had worked as a Technical Director on Jackson's earlier movie, The Frighteners. In 1996, Jackson asked Regelous to work on The Fellowship of the Ring, the first movie in the LOTR trilogy. Regelous was asked by Jackson to come up with a programme that could create the huge battle scenes in the trilogy. Regelous wrote the software over several years and it was utilised in all three Lord of the Rings movies. The 'revolutionary' new software generated individual 'agents' which, at the time, were the closest any programme had come to artificial intelligence in digital characters. In 2005, Regelous opened an office in Bangkok.

Awards by Stephen Regelous

Check all the awards nominated and won by Stephen Regelous.

2003


Academy Scientific and Technical Award (Scientific and Engineering award)
(For the design and development of Massive, the autonomous agent animation system used for the battle sequences in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Massive takes a new approach in simulating behaviors of large numbers of computer-generated extras a.k.a. agents. Each agent contains a primitive software brain used to develop behavioral rules simulating a wide range of behaviors. In The Lord of the Rings trilogy, over 200,000 agents were controlled in several scenes.)