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Graphics Software

Softimage Announces Toonz 4.4 for Linux 85

Posted by HeUnique from the this-is-good dept.
Softimage Announces Availability of Toonz Version 4.4 for Linux available at the end of this month. Press release is here. Could someone give a few words about Toonz please? I wonder when Softimage will port their XSI & DS products for Linux.
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Softimage Announces Toonz 4.4 for Linux More

Softimage Announces Toonz 4.4 for Linux

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  • Those fools! Blame Canada!!
  • and, yes, i'm just kidding...
  • Well, I think (I'm not sure) that this is a good chance for some studio's who want to switch from NT to Linux and uses Toonz 4.3 - since the upgrade is for free..

    Don't kill me - its just what I think I would do if our company was using NT and Toonz..
  • Why would you choose anything else for your render-farm?

    Because frankly, Linux is a pig to do things with.
  • Quebec based, to be EXACT

    Despite the best efforts of terrorist bombers and murderers, and blatant electoral fraud, Quebec remains a part of Canada.

  • Re:Toonz (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Actually Toonz is a bit easier cause it has an easier install procedure. Animo's install procedure is loooong and cruel.I was there when they were installing it in the multimedia lab at the university and let me tell ya the procedure was NOT something i would want to do..... In terms of features though ANimo is WAY ahead that toonz.
  • The sad thing is that CGI films are seen as more "adult" so they get the better storylines, (I take adult to mean mature story) and as a result there is a big buzz on about them, just look at Final Fantasy [finalfantasy.com], that movie looks insane and why? not because its CG but because its dark and has mature themes. Theres no reason why you can't make a mature 2D movie thats as dark and as good, and it would do great! studios just don't get it, why do they think Titan did so crappy? just look at the trailer! it smacks of silly kids movie. We are waiting for the next step, mature adult animation ala ghost in the shell. [amazon.com] Sigh...
  • What I think he was trying to say is "More commercial programs for Linux is a good thing, it gives Linux more overall credibility and makes the chances for normal priced commercialware ports higher", not that he keeps Win98 around for things like Toonz and Maya.
    --
  • SoftImage only distributes Toonz. The people who wrote it are Digital Video S.r.l. [divideo.it] is based in Rome. They also have quite a lot of information about the product on the Toonz area of the site [divideo.it].

    It looks like it's also being ported to Windows 2000. I found this under the history section.

  • C) If Intergraph supports the WildCat on Linux within 6 months, I'll print out an entire /. story and eat it. GeForce support is nice, but without support from the big guys (Evans and Sutherland, 3Dlabs, etc) Linux GL will have a hard time.

    Put some salt on your printer papers - Wildcat driver will be our RSN (hopefully when XFree 4.0.2 is out). I'm talking about few weeks - up to 2 months

    Want some ketchup with it? Oh, if you want a proof - take a look here [geocrawler.com]
  • Lots of people here have discussed the port in terms of further penetration of Linux into NT space. This may well happen, but let's not forget that SGI see Linux, not Irix, as the long term OS for their hardware, and are doing some very good work on the Linux kernel and porting JFS. It seems considerably more likely that this port is the first stage for SoftImage in getting their product ready for the day that SGI make the leap.
  • >Well, looks like the film industry is done with NT and who can blame them?

    >Within six months, a significant percentage of 3D work will shift to the Linux platform.

    What on earth makes you say that? Having a good linux server with apache is both better and cheaper than NT/IIS, but that has not convinced people to switch anyway.

    Solaris has had good OpenGL solutions for years now, and the Unix world is not going to shift to Linux because the XFree team has a beta of version 4 out. (Yes, the XFree versions are to be treated as betas.)

    >Why would you choose anything else for your render-farm?

    Actually I would choose something else. If I was stuck with x86, I would probably go for FreeBSD. On SPARC I wouldn't even dream of running Linux - choose Solaris. On alpha's Linux would probably be the choice though. Remember that the cost of a renderfarm is so huge that the OS doesn't even have a pricetag. Pixar's renderfarm consists of 96 Sun machines with 14 UltraSPARC 2's in each for instance. Don't even think about running Linux on this.

    >With the interactive apps becoming available, this will drive demand for real hardware OpenGL on Linux, which will benefit the casual linux user because games will run well.

    In some cases yes. But the professional OpenGL cards accelerate completely different parts of the pipeline than gamecards. Running Quake on a FireGL 1 or a Wildcat is not good, but interactive modelling is a lot faster than the game cards.

    >For someone like me, who is already doing all his 3D work in Linux with Blender and Corel PhotoPaint, this news comes as no surprise.

    >It really is a better platform for 3D work.

    Most definately not! The OpenGL drivers for SGI machines running IRIX, Sun boxes and even Windows are much faster and more reliable than the Linux ones. The only descent drivers for Linux are the nvidia ones, and they're not open source. (Matrox drivers are an exception here. The Windows OpenGL sucks so much it's hard to believe, where the oss Linux drivers are good.)

    >After suffering through the frequent crashes and general wierdness of Windows, my apps run rock-stable on linux, perform better and i...

    Wether or not your app is running more stable on Linux is a matter of programming it correctly. This has nothing to do with the unstability of Windows. As for performance, even the fastest OpenGL drivers for Linux are smoked completely by their Windows counterparts. Nvidia are very close (just a couple frames slower with Quake), and Matrox is the exception.

    >... couldn't be happier that its cost me nothing (well, if you count a couple of years slaving away figuring all this stuff out 'nothing')

    Exactly. Saying Linux is free means nothing for businesses who have to pay their sysadmins.

    All in all, I generally disagree with you completely. That being said, I develop an OpenGL program on Linux and Solaris, and after all the trouble of setting it up on Linux, I have no problems here. And development on Unix is definately a lot nicer than on Windows. The Redmond guys make a shitty OS, but they make catastrophical API's.
  • While I usually share your view that many Linux users want too much for free, in this case I think you are the one that can't see in the right perspective.

    How many animation studios/customers do you think there are for such a program, or worse, for Animo that costs UKP 10.000? The animation software/hardware system price tag for an animation shop with say 10 animators is in the $65.000 - $100.000 range, depending on which kind of hardware, O.S. and software you decide to use: this cuts out a very large number of people, myself and friends included.

    Since I can't afford a commercial program but I'd like to try producing something, I'm considering writing an animation program, and releasing it under the GPL: this allow me to save *years* of development thanks to the many tools available for integration in my programs (think for example Autotrace [go.com]), and to have other people working on the project for their own interest.

    Since my goal is to sell animation and not to sell software (which is and should be considered as a tool), animation is where I'll earn the money to pay for food and bills.
    As I see it, producing a good show thanks to the program will make me much more money than selling the program and support for it, mainly because the *market* for animation gives you many more chances that the software market.

    Ciao,
    Rob!
  • I really don't think so, since at least Japanese animation industry is still very strong in that kind of animation.

    Obviously, introducing new technologies such as 3D models, particle effects, digital FX and so on helps a lot, but it's not 3D or 2D, its *good* writers with something to say (or at least a clue on how to write on something they don't care for ;) versus suckers like Bill Mechanic that gives a sci-fi movie already started to Don Bluth, who did animated mice for his whole life.

    Too bad good writers usually have to agree to the decisions of the Bill Mechanic do-jour.

    Ciao,
    Rob!
    P.S.
    Are you the heroine behind Broadcast 2K? If so, good job! :)

  • BeOS's first biggest drawback for this sort of thing right now is no hardware OpenGL support. That should be fixed by the end of the year, if not sooner.

    The second drawback is the perception of support. If you set back the clocks 12-18 months you'll find a whole raft of commercial companies pledging support for BeOS, most of whom still haven't pledged support for Linux (although some are coming around). Why? Because Be was out there doing serious evangelizing and making their developers accessible for support to third parties. When Be announced their "focus shift" at the beginning of this year, the evangelism for desktop and media applications completely stopped, and the developer support became... spotty, at best. And the support from companies that needed a corporate face behind the OS evaporated.

    This is a kind of alien mindset to the Linux world--but it's the explanation, I think, for why a lot of commercial software does specify a distribution, particularly Red Hat. It's because Red Hat is out there doing that evangelism, and provides what is, for practical purposes, a developer point of contact for the operating system. (I think HelixCode and Eazel both may develop into other such points of contact--the key is the aggregation of informed developers who actually influence the kernel or an API under one roof.)

    So: yes, this sort of thing would be right up Be's alley. But a port from Irix to Linux isn't as much of a stretch as a port from Irix to BeOS. Linux provides hardware graphics support that BeOS doesn't yet, which would make developing such a port now impractical. BeOS has maybe 5% of the installed userbase as Linux does, and probably doesn't have the vertical market penetration that Linux does in A/V fields, simply because the applications aren't there.

    BeOS is where Linux was three or four years ago. A year ago, I'd have said BeOS was on the track for surpassing it in these vertical markets, but Be, Inc. pretty effectively derailed it. And, without either a commercial company actively developing the API for those markets (how likely is hardware support for high-end OpenGL cards from Be?) or a development model that allows third-party developers to propel the kernel and API themselves (i.e., more open source than it is now), I'm not sure I see it getting back on those rails.

  • Slashdot - News for Nerds. Not Linux News.

  • WTF?! (Score:2)

    by Parity ( 12797 )

    Programs like this is just what Linux needs. The lack of graphic programs for linux is what's keeping win 98 still on one of the particians of my computer...With this and Maya Linux is looking better and better to completely switching over.


    Did you even -look- at the article?! This is a 5-digit price-range professional animation package and it doesn't even -dream- of running on Windows98. It runs on Irix, NT, and now Linux. I do -not- think you're going to install this for fooling around at home, or that whether it is ported to Linux will make one bit of difference in either direction as to whether you kill the Win98 partition.


    --Parity

  • What Toonz is... (Score:4)

    by FattMattP ( 86246 ) on Tuesday July 25, 2000 @12:07PM (#906223) Homepage
    IIRC, Toonz is a digital compositing and ink & paint system for cel animators. It allows an animator to import a series of drawings from either files or via a scanner with a document feeder. Once imported or scanned, Toonz finds the edges of lines that you have drawn and thickens them up a bit. You can then composite cels much like you do in traditional 2D cel animation and assemble your characters over your backgrounds.

    You can also set fill points for your drawings that fill in closed areas such as a characters body or face, etc. These fill points can be animated over time via keyframes.

    This won't be a cheap product, BTW. Expect to pay SGI prices.

  • I've used toonz (4.0, not 4.4).. Its for 2d (cel) animation.. A package of tools to scan or shoot drawings, composite them, with FX, etc and out put for film or video -decent software, but I prefer 'USAnimation' by toonboom [toonboom.com], because it is vector-based. You scan your original art in, and it is converted to vectors for ink & paint, and compositing - The cool thing about this is that its not resolution dependent, you can take your original work and output to a small flash-vector file, or to a huge IMAX size film frame, without getting pixelization.

  • and who can blame them?

    Within six months, a significant percentage of 3D work will shift to the Linux platform.

    Why would you choose anything else for your render-farm?

    With the interactive apps becoming available, this will drive demand for real hardware OpenGL on Linux, which will benefit the casual linux user because games will run well.

    For someone like me, who is already doing all his 3D work in Linux with Blender and Corel PhotoPaint, this news comes as no surprise.

    It really is a better platform for 3D work.

    After suffering through the frequent crashes and general wierdness of Windows, my apps run rock-stable on linux, perform better and i couldn't be happier that its cost me nothing (well, if you count a couple of years slaving away figuring all this stuff out 'nothing')

    Where are you, Hash's Animation Master?? I want to run your software on Linux too!!

  • woopty fucking doo daa. How if the software costs a fortune, then you are really not opening it up to a broader base of animators, as the animators who know, use, and can afford your product already have NT or IRIX at their desk, and could care less if it is ported to Linux.

    Free Beer isn't the only reason to choose Linux. They may be able to afford IRIX or NT at their desk, but they might WANT Linux.

    For 2D animation, Linux is actually a good choice. You don't need all of the graphical power and IO bandwidth of an SGI box for that, but NT is just a pain.

    A typical Linux distro also has some nice features that IRIX lacks. The last time I worked on an SGI, I ended up grabbing a fair number of source packages off of a Linux source CD and compiled them for IRIX.

  • And all of what you just said concerns an article about a 2D cel animation software package exactly how?

  • Excuse me, I don't get it...

    You say that there will probably never be a soft|3D because there is too much old GL code in it...

    Although only NVidia comes today with OpenGL driver - I'm sure that higher end cards will comes with OpenGL driver also, so what exactly is the problem??

    Also, can you tell us if the XSI will use the DRI or OpenGL libs? (Wildcat driver will use DRI if I understood Intense3D people correctly)

  • Kharma Whore Cut-n-Paste HOWTO (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This guy wrote the book...
  • Toonz is a 2D animation paint / composite program. Good stuff and used it alot before moving to Retas Pro (mucho cheaper AND SoftImage was sticking a Toonz logo on all rendered materials on the educational version). It's an extremely functional, super thorough piece of code that gave me little problems less having a large learning curve.

    Morale of Story, use Retas and Photoshop plug-ins :P

    -f0rge
    He who rules the penguins, rules the world...

  • No (Score:1)

    by Al Wold ( 5038 )
    No, there aren't.

    actually, I'd suggest checking out blender, which is kind of fun...www.blender.nl (actually, it's not gnu, so i guess it must be completely worthless)

  • cool (Score:1)

    by Al Wold ( 5038 )
    yes, this is very cool. especially, considering redhat sucks so much. :)
  • while not completely whiz-bang, blender does a nice job of providing animation in the linux realm of things...
    tagline
  • I think that's where this [slashdot.org] comes in?

    --
    "You take a distribution! Rename! Stamp CD's! IPO!"
    - CmdrTaco, Geeks in Space, Episode 2 from 6:18 to 6:23.
  • One could potentially acheive the same results that Toonz provides using Gimp and some custom scripts. Many Animators on a budget do that (well, they generally use photoshop instead of Gimp). Essentially, the first thing you need is a script to automate scanning in hundreds of hand drawn cells. Then you use a gimp script to bring all those cells into a different numbered layer in one XCF file. Then you can use the animation tools that the Gimp already has. Granted, this isn't as powerfull a setup as Toonz, but then when it comes to graphics, free software is seldom as powerful.
  • They (AVID owned Softimage team) can't even port their newest "Next-Generation 3D Animation" effort to the once SI|3D Native IRIX. Softimage|XSI 1.0 on IRIX is actually the NT version running under emulation, causing horrible slow-down and a considerable ammount of bugs. Many under valid support contracts who got their XSI "upgrades" have been most disappointed by their IRIX performance.

    While TOONZ for LINUX may seem like a step in the right direction, take into consideration that TOONZ is actually developed by an R&D Company called DIGITAL VIDEO [http]. I take this directly from the softimage.com toonz legal type:

    Toonz is developed in Italy by SBP S.p.a, Itaca S.r.l. and Digital Video S.r.L. and is distributed by Softimage Co. All other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.

    So if you're expecting the Montreal team to put out anything other than buggy and non-production ready software i.e. XSI 1.0, don't hold your breath. You might get lucky with Mental Ray though, as that is also developed by a seperate company, MENTAL IMAGES [mentalimages.com].

    I for one hope that Softimage can get their colletive heads out of their collective butts and jump on the cross-platform compatibility bandwagon a'la A|W's Maya. Otherwise they (or at least their 3D division) face a rapidly growing dissatisfied and defeated user base who have had enough of their lies, bull and empty promises.

    -not bitter :)
  • Yes, blender is reasonably nice (albeit very difficult to get the hang of. I'm still not productive in it), but it is a 3D animation program. We are discussing 2D animation, like the Smurfs.
  • Err, there are numerous other cards that have XFree drivers, like my spiffy new Voodoo3, or the Matrox G400. And the two cards I just mentioned have open sourced drivers. Nvidia's drivers are binary only.

    XSI will use OpenGl. Any card that is going to provide decent performance is going to use DRI though. Softimage has a nasty habit of using GL for everything. For instance, in Softimage 3D, all the buttons are done in OpenGL. Worse, they somehow write their code so that it stresses many cards that you would think would be up to the task. Softimage 3D on a Wildcat system sure is nice though :) (my school has one. Only downside is that it's NT).
  • IIRC Digital Domain used Mentalray for the rendering on linux to create the effects for Titanic.

    A portion of Titanic was rendered in Mental Ray, but the vast majority was rendered using Pixar's prMan (Photorealistic Renderman).

  • Darn it, I'm getting so ansy waiting for BeOS 5 with OpenGL. I have a box ready to have BeOS 5 and a second processor inserted as soon as it ships.

    BTW, is it possible to get GL hardware support to work under BeOS 4.5 with a Voodoo3 card? I know that the Voodoo2s are supported, but I can't find any info on the Voodoo3. Oh well.
  • Line Animation is dead. That is exactly why line animation from Japan is increasingly popular in the US. Because we all know that dead things are the most popular.
  • SGI sees Linux as their future low end, but Irix will continue to be offered for multi-processor (e.g., 16-512 CPU Origin) and their ilk.
  • MentalRay isn't from Microsoft. It is from a company called MentalImages. Their URL is http://www.mentalray.com/.
  • That helps to a degree, but guess what, OpenGL accelerators are much more homogeneous than Linux distributions, standards guides or not. And from a company that certifies specific OpenGL accelerators to use, I'm not sure that that document is going to change their stance on supporting multiple distributions.
  • Oh, I were under the impression that Softimage contained a lot of OpenGL code that was really old and maybe not standards complient. I'm pretty sure there's no IrisGL code in there, because SoftImage's main platform was WindowsNT for awhile (and actually still is.)
  • Didn't Softimage used to be owned by Microsoft?

    zsazsa
  • According to the article, Toonz is commercial payware. Are there any reliable GNU animation tools?
  • Toonz is a 2D cel-animation program. Perhaps a discussion of how or why this story matters to more than 1% of Slashdot's readers would be a more interesting read than this crap.


    Bowie J. Poag

  • It's not distro specific! Hooray! (Score:3)

    by PsychoKiller ( 20824 ) on Tuesday July 25, 2000 @11:44AM (#906249) Homepage
    A great deal of programs have been announced for RedHat Linux, and I think it's great that this company is not saying that you have to run it on a specific distribution.
  • Geez. And here I sit watching my favorite Bat Man or Animaniacs cartoon and think of all the effort that went into their creation. Soon computers will do everything.

    I mean if no effort goes into the creation of a thing, just how much effort should I put into watching it?

  • Who cares one way or the other?

    For one, it's the past.

    For two, even if Microsoft still owned them, they (SoftImage) make great software, so what does it matter?
  • Mentalray is the rendering engine used by Softimage and has been available for the linux platform for some time now. IIRC Digital Domain used Mentalray for the rendering on linux to create the effects for Titanic. Mentalray is owned by Mental Images. ok. i ramble entirely too much. [mentalray.com]
  • Perhaps a discussion of how or why this story matters to more than 1% of Slashdot's readers would be a more interesting read than this crap. Well, I just got handed your crap, so how is this article any different? Just maybe, somebody's got different interests than you've got. Just a thought -- I've been wrong before.
  • The failure of Titan AE, the 360 layoffs at Fox Animation had most everyone in the industry calling it quits for line animation. What audiences want is computer animation.
  • Its a port of a program from a major company to Linux. Why WOULDN'T LinuxDot report on this? (Not that there's anything wrong with being Linux oriented) Of course, if this results in a port of SoftImage, it will be a very funny thing. SoftImage, Blender, and Moonlight renderer are all programs from UI hell. After taking a look at the Maya demo, you'll find that SoftImage's UI is less functional. (Not to mention butt ugly)
  • Alot of us had fun as kids playing with Mario Paint. Are there any open source 2D animation programs out there? A quick search yielded only lame shareware programs that didn't really cut it, and were intended to be used on making animated GIFs.
  • A) You're six month figure is ridiculous. Maybe in time, but nowhere near six months.
    B) What does a render farm have anything to do with it? And you MIGHT choose BSD, since it supposedly does better under that kind of load. Either way, the 3D modeler part won't actually ever run on the render farm, just the backend renderer.
    C) If Intergraph supports the WildCat on Linux within 6 months, I'll print out an entire /. story and eat it. GeForce support is nice, but without support from the big guys (Evans and Sutherland, 3Dlabs, etc) Linux GL will have a hard time.
    D) I'll argue the better platform part. For me, NT tends to be extremely stable, and I for one prefer all the great tools available on NT over their less than spectacular Linux counterparts.
  • A great deal of programs have been announced for RedHat Linux, and I think it's great that this company is not saying that you have to run it on a specific distribution.

    Realisticlly, given that Toonz costs so much, any shop that decided to deploy it on Linux boxen is going to essentually make their own custom distribution.

    This is a product that will be deployed to animation shops in the Far East. They will have cheap, fast machines built and put their custom distribution (loads of stuff stripped out, loads of custom stuff put in) on dozens of them. There will be a few individuals buying a single copy and installing it on out-of-the-box Red Hat, but that will not represent the majority of installations.

    Remember: This is the market that supported a product (Cambridge Animation Works) on the NeXT. People bought NeXT boxes specifically to get that software.

    Could mean a lot of fun support jobs out there. And away from the Bay area and Silicon Valley. Animators work all over the world. Cool.

  • Being that I'm pretty ignorant about Be, and you are apparently the "be-fan", I would have thought that this stuff was right into Be's realm. From what I've read, I thought Be was specifically geared towards this kind of graphics processing that you're talking about.

    Honest curiousity going on here, so if this comes off as my attempt at a flame, try reading it again. I too find that NT 4.0 Workstation is the client to beat out there when looking at a stability and software availability stand point. A lot of the structure to Be sounds interesting, but much like with Linux I'd be hard pressed to leave the software base presently supporting NT.

    Your message just sent flags off in my head as to what all Be has going for it these days in the way of applications since a lot of what you listed would seem to be into Be's realm of hoped for market share.
  • Well, a story line that didn't suck would have helped just a wee bit as well.
  • I'm told that Softimage demoed an early RedHat port of XSI 1.5 at SIGGRAPH yesterday (Monday), but the port is still in the early stages.

    Hopefully the development of OGL drivers will keep up with all the 3D software releases (Maya and now XSI)... this was always a problem under NT - a driver/card combo that might be great for Quake, Photoshop, etc., would often crash like mad under Softimage... it was always a real trick to find affordable cards whose drivers would work with these packages.

  • I know, I'm spooling up my printer right now. I posted this, then I looked down the posts, and somebody asked that if the WildCat driver will use DRI or not... But my point about support from other vendors still stands (although is weakened due to the fact that WildCat is the highest performing part and will probably lead to the other supporting it.)
  • I have spent about three years programming a 2D animation program but we don't give it away for free. It is not intended consumers but rather big professional companies. It costs $1495 a pop.

    It will be released for Linux also.

    http://www.km-animation.dk/pap
  • What you need, my friend, is a copy of DPaint IV.
  • Yeah, but it another $12k package?
  • The failure of Titan AE, the 360 layoffs at Fox Animation had most everyone in the industry calling it quits for line animation. What audiences want is computer animation.

    Tell that to the creators of Pokemon... The real problem here is that American audiences typically aren't going to see a movie that looks like a "cartoon" unless it's geared at kids. Heavy Metal flopped badly too. I just refuse to believe any of these films would've been any more successful if they'd been 3D CGI WizBango-ified.

    It's a sad situation really. Maybe it will change. I still cringe when I see trailers for animated films set to poppy alternacrap songs that are best suited for crap PG 13 films. I think this is part of the reason those of us who enjoy anime don't always care for the lobotomized American take on the whole thing.

    *gel

  • In some cases yes. But the professional OpenGL cards accelerate completely different parts of the pipeline than gamecards. Running Quake on a FireGL 1 or a Wildcat is not good, but interactive modelling is a lot faster than the game cards.

    I don't know about that. Halflife and Quake3 looked pretty darn good on the Wildcat machine I saw it on. 1280x1024 and not a frame drop in site.
  • That's not my point at all. There's nothing wrong with wanting something for free (I know I do!) My point is twofold
    A) He said it is "commerical payware." Just the tone of that sounds like some guy who says, "I'm not going to use ". As if this is in any way on the same level as that.
    B) I understand that people wnat a free alternative if they can't afford it, they're nothing wrong with that. In fact, the main thing I admire about the OSS community (and probably the ONLY thing I admire) is that they're willing to shut up an code something if the products on the market aren't satisfactory. However, the way that previous poster worded his post, I got the impression that he wasn't going to use it because it wasn't free, and actually expected to find an OpenSource application that come anywhere close. I don't know, just the TONE pissed me off. As for your animation package, good luck. However if you produce anything close to Animo, I suggest you find a way to sell it!
  • Wow. A double-dose of stupidity! :)

    A) "And I see you got yourself thrown off Metalab"? Dumbass, propaganda.tilez.org just redirects to metalab.unc.edu/propaganda. We're still there, and have no intention of ever leaving. Dislodge your head from your ass and you might notice it next time you visit. From the sound of it, i'd say you visit it often.

    B) You forgot to mention a link. Here's two.

    PROPAGANDA (MetaLab) [unc.edu]

    PROPAGANDA (Tilez.org) [tilez.org]

    Have a nice day!


    Bowie J. Poag
  • Ok, I understand your point about the attitude of many users, but I think it depends a lot on how you are going to use a product. As an examples, to earn my food :) I've been working in the last 8 years as a Lotus Notes programmer. Notes (or Domino, as they call the main technology behind it now) is based on some very bright ideas, but has tons of stupid defects and plain bugs. More than once I've found bugs that stopped me dead in the track, but that were so easy to understand and to fix that I've found myself screaming bloody murder for not having access to sources or developers.

    I do agree that this is not the main reason behind so many people requesting open source here on /. ;) but the problem is: if you are betting your company on a software (or any other tool) you have to be able to fix it as soon as possible, with the lowest possbile expense. That's basic business practice.
    In the software market, given the huge numbers of morons that do write code (skill shortage, remember? :), having the source is often the only option you have in such cases. I'm not saying I want the program or the source for free, obviously, but don't charge me 10 to 20 times the price for source access, as is always the case (I've been told by a Sun exec that Mossad did buy, check and compile it's own version of Solaris, but they have deeeeep pockets ;).

    Back to the still-to-be-written program: if it will become a useful thing for everyone, then I could think to put up a separate company to sell *support* for it, but with these kind of products (very complex and often in need of deep customizations) I'll never attempt to sell it directly: managing the program and all its variations in a close manner is going to cost so much that the sale price for the program will be many times the maximum 'sane' sale price that could allow you to gain a decent market share.

    Ciao,
    Rob!
  • Really? That's impresive...Especially considering that 1.0 just got released only a short while ago... I think it smells funny ;)
  • I am nowhere near stupid enough to thinnk that this will be free (free beer?). So I wonder what it will cost. Looking at the Press Release, it looks like some bigger names are using it and are satisfied with it's results.

    I myself would love to have a go at animation at that level, just to play around, but in all likelyhood the software costs thousands of dollars, well beyond my price range.

    Speaking of price ranges the Release mentions that, "The expansion of the Toonz product to these new platforms
    increases the accessibility of the industry's leading 2-D cel animation software to a broader base of animators." woopty fucking doo daa. How if the software costs a fortune, then you are really not opening it up to a broader base of animators, as the animators who know, use, and can afford your product already have NT or IRIX at their desk, and could care less if it is ported to Linux.


    www.mp3.com/Undocumented [mp3.com]

  • Toonz (Score:4)

    by Kreed ( 215140 ) on Tuesday July 25, 2000 @11:45AM (#906274)
    Is basically a slightly (Perhaps more then slightly) outdated 2d animation compositing package, when I was working at warner bros. it was under consideration but was dropped in favor of Animo, a much more fully featured animation/compositing package. I think animo is easier to use as well, Dreamworks uses it exclusively for all their productions... Tom

  • Yes, Microsoft sold Softimage to Avid in 1998 (Score:3)

    by cpeterso ( 19082 ) on Tuesday July 25, 2000 @11:45AM (#906275) Homepage
    Here's the story: "Microsoft sells SoftImage to Avid buyer: Deal worth a total of $285 million" [194.159.40.109]

    Microsoft has sold SoftImage to Avid Technology for $285 million, four years after it bought the firm for $130 million. SoftImage specialises in creating special effects for the film industry, and has been bought by Avid to broaden its portfolio. The company makes video editing systems, which also sold to the film and to the TV industries.

    The terms of the agreement are that Microsoft will receive $79 million in cash from Avid, will get $93 million of Avid's shares with a ten year option to buy more, and keep nine per cent of Avid's shares. Intel owns seven per cent of Avid shares. The other components of the deal include subordinate notes worth $5 million and sale of stock to ex-Microsoft employees.


  • The price is right in the article, and it ain't exactly cheap.

    The complete Toonz version 4.4 is expected to ship at the end of July 2000. Toonz version 4.4 for Irix, Linux and Windows NT and Windows 2000 platforms is available for USMSRP $11,995. A video resolution version of the studio license is also available for USMSRP $8,495. Users of Toonz version 4.3, under a maintenance contract, will receive a free upgrade to Toonz version 4.4. Scintillae version 1.0 will be available for USMSRP $2,490. For pricing on add-on packages, maintenance contracts and training, please contact the nearest Avid or Softimage reseller.

  • I think he meant that Softimage contains too much GL code. Although it still doesn't make any sense.
  • This affects all of us.. the more companies we can get to provide ports of the products .. the better off we all will be. someone has to start somewhere.. its all about competition, so far, we have support from alias|wavefront, and now softimage .. hopefully .. we will see more ports of graphics software soon.
  • Programs like this is just what Linux needs. The lack of graphic programs for linux is what's keeping win 98 still on one of the particians of my computer...With this and Maya Linux is looking better and better to completely switching over.

  • Re:It's not distro specific! Hooray! (Score:3)

    by be-fan ( 61476 ) on Tuesday July 25, 2000 @01:09PM (#906280)
    Well, it just makes their life harder. Maybe if companies started requiring a certain distribution, we'd put an end to all the incompatibility between distributions. I mean, I don't seriously think they're going to allow you to use any "Bob's custom distro" here. This is a company who certifies the hardware you're running the thing on, and for something as quirky as the various Linux distributions, I'm sure they'll narrow it down to one or two that they'll support.
  • You're kidding right? Not only is it commercial "payware" but it is "software that'll cost you an arm and a leg and you have to buy a new computer to use." Hell, this thing costs more than a lot of CARS! If you can find a GNU animation tool that comes anywhere within the same solar system as this thing, then you've found a really dedicated OSS guy because he just gave away a few million dollars. Geez, Linux users and the whole "perspective" problem.
  • Hooboy! How many times have I wished my computers had an 'animate' button - These tools have been in use for a long time, All those shows use some variety of software to finish up the show -That certainly doesn't mean they don't still need a whole team of animators, clean up artists, etc, etc..

    The computer on its own is not going to do sweet fuck-all. And you can STILL tell the difference between a project with a good team of artists, and one where they thought maybe the computer could do more. And believe you me, a LOT of effort still has to go into 'good' animation (come to think of it, even 'bad' animation takes a hell of a lot of effort).

  • According to some research I made in the last few months, there's nothing.

    I'm planning to start such a project right about now, and posted an Ask Slashdot on the subject on the 28 of June. It's still in the queue, but CmdrTaco says it's normal :-?

    I've also set up a project on SourceForge, but for now it still lack an home page. There is a M/L that you can subscribe to from http://sourceforge.net/projects/anitoolbox [sourceforge.net].

    If you have or want informations on Free projects regarding animations, or even if you know of some good "building blocks" (for example Autotrace [go.com] to do the bitmap to vector conversion) to create such a thing , drop me an email.

    Ciao,
    Rob!
  • GL != OpenGL. OpenGL is the "Open Graphics Library." It is cross-platform, and the API is published. It's the replacement for GL. GL is the "Graphics Library," also called IrisGL. It's still found on SGI machines for programs that use it, but it isn't cross platform, the API is harder to program for, it's old and not developed for anymore, etc. There are wrappers that take IrisGL calls and morph them into OpenGL calls, but they don't always work. I don't know if Softimage contains a lot of original GL code, but if it is any significant amount, the port will be that much harder. I think that was what the original poster was talking about. Just have to know a lot about Irix/SGI stuff.
    ----
    Ryan
  • Even in this age of computers, and in the forseeable future, one hell of a lot of work goes into producing high quality animation. Someone still writes it, and someone still storyboards it.

    The voices for the characters are recorded. Then someone actually has to go through the entire voice track and mark up exactly what mouth positions the characters should have to match the voice track. To make it look good (i.e. not like anime) that comes out to about 6-12 mouth positions per second. None of this is done by computers.

    The characters are then drawn roughly (keep in mind that a single animator can only work on a few seconds of each 7 minute TV cartoon). In fact, for most of the Cartoon Network shows anyway (which I have actual experience with the creation of) , the only part done on computer is the ink and paint, compositing (combining two or more layers to make up a single scene, such as when we draw Bugs' head, torso, and arms on seperate layers), and the actual combining of the frames to do the animation, but someone's still gotta operate the computer. See all those names at the end of the cartoon? Those people all did quite a lot, and that doesn't even mention all of the people who contributed. Don't even get me started on the 70 piece orchestra they bring in to score the cartoons.

    A bit off topic, but I'm sensistive about animation =-)
  • If microsoft *still* owned them, IRIX support would be gone, and you'd be using DirectX instead of OpenGL.

    One thing the microsoft flunkies were trying to get the dev crew to do was port Softimage|3D to DirectX. Fortunately, they had enough weight with MS to hold out, and were eventually sold, I believe, to AVID.

    There are microsoft copyrights all over it still, mostly due to the Mental Ray renderer, which I believe is a Microsoft product (one of the very FEW that supports non-MS OSes).

    All that aside, I'd love to see Softimage|3D ported to Linux. I get to use the NT version at school (NPHS, we have 2 copies of extreme, getting a 3rd), and although it's sorta clunky at modeling, it's a breeze for animation and rendering.

  • About Toonz and what it is :- (Score:5)

    by cOdEgUru ( 181536 ) on Tuesday July 25, 2000 @11:49AM (#906287) Homepage Journal
    Toonz is a complete 2D animation system designed to meet the rigorous production criteria of the modern cel animation industry while preserving the integrity of the animator's work.

    Toonz allows artists to capture the emotive quality of their hand-drawn art. It also simplifies and accelerates the production process allowing artists to fast forward through the more tedious steps like inking and painting and focus more on the creative aspects of production. Artists can then augment their work through advanced digital compositing and special effects.

    Toonz is used extensively in feature film, commercial, video, and interactive media productions.

    Designed by cel animation artists and producers, Toonz is an exposure sheet-driven digital ink and paint program that precisely traces the steps of traditional hand-drawn animation, while giving you all the efficiencies and options of a digitized medium.

    Toonz behaves like a traditional toolset, but contains powerful tools that automate time-consuming tasks. Easy to learn, animators can become productive almost immediately. Flexible database management tools provide quick and easy access to your work. Recent improvements include faster render and preview speeds.

  • The proper way to say the "Image" in their name isn't like how you'd say "image file". It's "Imahj"
  • The real killer will be if Softimage|3D (and mental ray) are ported to Linux.

    It's one of the best modeling/animation tools I've ever had a chance to use, and I'd like to see it ported to a little more powerful of a platform (or if you prefer, something that looks a little more native, seeing as how the SI|3D UI on NT looks totally out of place. It truly is a *NIX app).

    Mainly I'd want it on linux cause then no one else would mess with the config! You have no idea how much one person can damage an installation simply because they know how to use Explorer. (this coming from a highschool student about other highschool students...)

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