Stephen Regelous

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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. Today, Regelous works at Massive Software, the company he founded to market Massive to the film and television industry.

Regelous continues to refine his Academy Award winning Massive Software brain, originally created to control intelligent self-animated crowd characters. It's now not only for crowd scenes, it's also soon to be used for hero characters. In the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, artists at Rhythm&Hues were able to use Massive to control second tier characters standing directly behind live action hero characters. More recently Regelous teamed up with David Hanson of Hanson Robotics in the US, to help create "Zeno" a cartoon like robot character that is real. Zeno's brain is the Massive brain, now being used to control an actual robot instead of a crowd of animated characters. The level of intelligence is impressive. Zeno is fully conversational, can recognize people and respond appropriately.