Animation and SFX with Linux 109
Zurk writes "Here's an article with the inside scoop on how animation studios and special effects shops actually deploy Linux in house. Also mentions how the Linux systems are replacing SGI systems at a rapid clip and
some regular user comments on working with linux for graphics work."
Wow, Tina Staples is a babe! (Score:1)
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:1)
DGolden: I bought Realsoft when it came out for Windows, partly because it's great software, partly because it would be out for Linux eventually. I have since suffered through a year and a half of "eventually" with no end in sight! Photogenics is a really cool (and fast!) paint program, but seems more adept at making little visual tricks than at making paintings. To really be productive software, it ought to have pressure sensitivity, custom brushes and layers a-la Photoshop. GIMP has potential. I just wish that the brush-pipes were better implemented so that you could select their colors from the palette, instead of having to rely on the built-ins. It would also be nice if one didn't have to re-compile GTK+ and GIMP just to have access to a pressure-sensitive Wacom tablet. This is well beyond the ability of a typical desktop end-user. 16 bits per channel would be nice, too.
I know, I know
Re:How does linux help? (Score:1)
The Nvidia OpenGL libs are the same as for Windows. Difference lies in GLX as opposed to WGL. However, you must remember that Nvidia isn't a workstation level graphics card, It's a consumer level card, directed at mainly games. Therefore the resources are directed at making games fast(which only uses a subset of OpenGL). It's however also fully OpengGL 1.2 compliant. The non-game-related OpenGL part just aren't as fast as on workstation level cards.
"OpenGL-in-a-Window" makes no sense. Of course you can run OpenGL in a window(how else would you show the graphics). If you're talking about embedding it in one of the standard widget toolkits for Linux(GTK+, QT ...), then most of them have OpenGL widget to accomodate.
Granted, workstation level graphics card support isn't there yet(altough some cards are supported, and several more are in the workings).
I suggest you read up on the topic next time(If you don't work in the field) before you post outdated BS.
Re:AMD Answer?? (Score:1)
Because OS X has only been out for a little over six months? All the reviews have said it's still beta quality and the performance is bad even on the top end Macs. Almost no software is native yet especially the programs they use like Photoshop. It's way too early to jump on OS X.
Sure they could use Darwin, but that's not what their software vendors are writing their programs for. They're willing to do some custom work, not ALL of it. They could use PowerPC Linux if there's really a hardware advantage. SGI has also been doing a lot of porting work to Linux which would make it an easy transition.
On the hardware side, supply is probably an issue. Apple historically has had chronic problems supplying hardware, especially the high end equipment that Dreamworks would want. Multi-vendor hardware has a lot of advantages. In the article they said they don't even have support contracts, they just keep spare computers on hand. You can't do that if you can't even get computers in the first place. The stupidest move Jobs ever made was killing the Mac clones.
It's not like they don't use Macs, the article specifically mentioned Mac Photoshop for background work and I'm sure they use it for other things. A place like Dreamworks will use the best tool for the job whether it's Linux, Windows or Mac. The article is about Linux usage so why would they spend a lot of time talking about Mac?
Hypocrisy (Score:5)
If decent visual effects applications were available on Linux (I do NOT mean POV-RAY or GIMP!) then perhaps the Linux user base among "digital content" professionals would increase. So far, Linux developers have shown practially zero interest in developing applications which are truly useful to artists. Where, for instance can I find a linux app that plays TIFF sequences at 24fps?
Unfortunately, Dreamworks is operating in a self contained Linux bubble. For most end users interested in visual effects or animation, Windows or Mac machines are far better alternatives. I'm not trolling, here, just pointing out a very disheartening fact. It is frustrating to see the Linux community celebrate a studio like Dreamworks, but when it comes to developing code, they just don't give a s*** about the sort of work Dreamworks is doing!
Re:Spirit the horse, spirit of linux. (Score:2)
It doesn't make sense for them to release their actual tools; these tools are only useful to people animating movies; such people are the competition. But it makes sense for them to release anything useful in other industries, because it is likely that it will get used and improved by someone who isn't competing with DreamWorks. Free software in business works because you only have to stay ahead of the competition, not all of the other people who might use the software.
Re:Spirit the horse, spirit of linux. (Score:2)
It is also quite likely that they are not using any GPL code, so they can even sell their programs. They are using LGPL libraries plenty, I'm sure, so if they modify those for their own use they need to release those modifications.
Just because it runs on Linux does not mean it has to use the GPL, no matter how much Bill Gates wishes otherwise...
Re:C++ compiler people are on this (Score:1)
The C/C++ user's journal ran a very interesting roundup [cuj.com] regarding this. The STL situation seems a bit on the bad side, but the compiler itself seems to be pretty much standards conformant. Having to swith between SGI's MIPSpro, HP's aCC and gcc is sometimes painful but you can usually fix one compiler's complaining and still have it work with the other two.
Re:Hybrid software/hardware rendering (Score:2)
There's still a lot of algorithms that you can't easily map to hardware (in other words, stuff that's much easier to program in software only). There's also the problem about the ammount of memory on the graphics card being much lower than the system's memory. Even if you can rasterize textured triangles much faster in hardware than in software, you still want to apply lots of texture layers to your objects, you want to work with larger and much more detailed textures or in general you need more realism than what current hardware-based algorithms can deliver.
But yes, you are right, hardware accelerated render farms will be something common in the future. The massively parallel pieces of silicon that current GPUs are is something you can't ignore. I have done some work on hardware accelerated distributed rendering, but alas, the website is not up yet. For interactive applications is not as good as I had hoped (instead of increasing the speed I can increase the problem size with a little performance gain on the side) but for applications where you want your stuff rendered faster (100x or 1000x faster), it's definitely a go.
The OpenGL case is really sweet: you can use GLX PBuffers (I understand WGL supports something similar too, as will DX-something, if not the current one) to render off-screen. In practical terms that means the size of your image is limited by the size of the available memory on the card. If you don't have GLX 1.3 support (ATI can I have some docs please, I want to understand how the card performs memory management in order to write such an extension for the Radeon under XFree86) you can still use tiling [mesa3d.org] and get the same result (slower maybe, but anything faster than pure software is a gain here)
Re:How does linux help? (Score:3)
Read the article, it answers precisely this question. First consider what the task at hand is: rendering animations for the silver screen, that means hardware accelerated OpenGL rendering doesn't cut it, it's highly probable that you want to do software rendering. You have shadows, volumetric effects, particle systems, whatever, the point is you want to render this at a very high resolution and with a very high level of detail. For that kind of task, hardware rendering, either SGI or PC based, doesn't cut it or doesn't make sense (why would you want to render this interactively? noone is interacting with the scene). Morale: you want faster machines with lots of memory. Compare a farm of SGIs with a farm of PCs with the same raw processing power and the same ammount of memory. If you ignore the memory bandwidth issue, PCs beat SGIs hands down (if you doubt this try to figure out what SGI is doing right now and why they are getting into the IA64 market)
Then there's the "it's Unix" factor. If you are a Unix house (and have been for a lot of time -- DreamWorks is) you don't want to forget about all your in house tools and move to Windows to profit from the better price/performance ratio of PCs. You want to keep using Unix. Linux, for practical purposes, is that. Why not other PC Unices? (Solaris or the BSDs) Linux has better support, both in terms of hardware and software. It's easier to get people skillfull in Linux than the other alternatives, and the number is increasing, which means it's probably a bit cheaper, too.
Regarding the compiler issue someone else mentioned, there are several alternatives, like the Portland Group compilers, to name one. If it is an issue, the studio can invest in this. I'm sure they have evaluated the cost/benefit of this. If they say GCC cuts it for them...
And last, the above post is an obvious troll... moderators, are you awake?
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:1)
Actually, several of those companies used to support UNIX (Solaris, IRIX, etc.) decently at one point in time. Did you know there was Photoshop for 'nix? Well, only up to 3.0 anyways.
At some point (a bit before Linux went big) they all seem to have said "to hell with unix", and stopped the ports. Now it's completely foreign to them.
Re:How this can expand outside the "bubble" (Score:1)
You know that you're probably the only reason they're not on AOL. If you don't see them, or move out of town for a year or so, chances are they'll all drift back to AOL "'cause it's what all their friends use". AOL seems to have some kind of weird evil draw like that.
Re:How does linux help? (Score:2)
Oh please! Mese is meant to be a knock-off in-software OpenGL implementation. Sure, it may work properly, but you don't use Mesa for hardware accelerated OpenGL. Also, the nVidia drivers aren't all that great when it comes to things like "gasp" OpenGL-in-a-Window. (ok, it works, but not that well)
OpenGL in X kinda just works perfectly if you're using a real UNIX machine (yes, I've got an SGI and a Sun). On a Linux box, it's hack 'n pray. Remember, for professional work it's the "quality" of the implementation/output just as much as the speed. (and most pro-grade PeeCee 3D cards are still NT-only, it seems)
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:1)
Also, photogenics is still actively developing - each time I go back to the website, new cool stuff has been added, and Paul Nolan seems to be very receptive to any suggestions for "things that might be cool" - but, and from my linux-using perspective, unfortunately, Paul Nolan's expending most of his efforts on Photogenics on the next-gen Amiga computers - presumably as Amiga Inc. want it as a DPaint-style "killer app" to shift their new boxes, which might one day in the far future actually appear...
My art-wise background is the amiga demo scene, and photogenics makes such work incredibly easy. I find photoshop clunky and slow to use compared to most amiga-style paint packages - as I hinted, this may simply be since I learnt the amiga ones first, similar to the way a windows user will actually find KDE harder to use than someone who has never used a computer before...
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:4)
Old Amiga people may recognise Realsoft as the makers of Real3D, an amiga raytacer that excelled at solid modelling and keyframe animation - it's especially good at glasses, liquids and crystals, since the light beams are modelled going through the whole material, rather than just surface effects, so you get real-looking stuff like caustics, working magnifying lenses, etc...
The new Realsoft version looks very, very cool...
For 2D static work, photogenics [paulnolan.com] has been available for some time - it's really best for orignal composition, rather than image processing, and is, once again, a modernised version of an old amiga application. GIMP (and photoshop) both suck for orignal 2D work, IMHO. (then again, they both started out as "image manipulation" tools rather than bitmap-painting packages, and I did learn Amiga paint tools first...).
I agree that the state of 2D animation on linux isn't great - although, at least, we now have a decent lossless animation file format that (a) is open and (b) doesn't suck, in the form of the MNG superset of PNG - see libmng [libmng.com]
Re:Real Statistics (Score:1)
Hi Dan, other DreamWorks gestures include the driver I contributed to the Argyll Color Management System [access.net.au] to support the Gretag Spectrolino. I belive we may have developed some raster-to-vector code for an open source project as well.
Re:AMD Answer?? (Score:1)
None of the rendering and animation software we use was released and supported on OS X at the time we made the decision. Even today, I think, we're still waiting for packages like Maya and Shake on OS X.
On the renderfarm, the batch management software we use isn't supported on Mac so we'd have to manage our jobs some other way. We can't get anywhere near the rackspace density -- we're using 1U enclosures with dual 1 Ghz Pentium 3's and 2 GB RAM.
On the desktop, we use Macintoshes for Photoshop and virtually nothing else.
On the business side, we realize we're limited to just one supplier for Macintosh hardware. We had that with SGI, it's tough to imagine going with a sole source for computing equipment.
Re:SGI is stupid (Score:2)
It is extremely arrogant of software engineers to assume that the entire US industry revolves around us - because it simply does NOT.
I would be tempted to dissagree with the fact that there is no "linux jobs", because that is simply not true. RedHat may not be hiring additional engineers at this time, but they are employing plenty including many of the big names of linux kernel development. Also were I work, we've started using linux for right about all of our server work. Sysadmins now administer linux boxes, some new programmers were hired, but most are the old programmers that used to program on other platforms (VAXes, Digital Unix). What's wrong with that? Absolutely nothing.
Are you under the impression that now all the sudden that linux is here MORE positions should exist? Why is that?
Re: (Score:1)
Re:How this can expand outside the "bubble" (Score:1)
After the second or blue screen on a common filter you understand why Macs are still the Photoshop tool of choice. That and a 400 Mhz G3 blowing the doors off a 800 Mhz PIII in Photoshop...
I use the GIMP a lot now because it is more convenient than getting up and going into the design studio to work on the spare G4.
Re:AMD Answer?? (Score:1)
The Macintosh and OSX are made by....Apple.
Steve Jobs is the CEO of Apple.
Steve Jobs is also the CEO of Pixar.
Dreamworks and Pixar are competitors.
(Of course, Pixar uses a Sun-hardware-based renderfarm, of all things - something to do with CPU-power per volume)...
Listen Up also wrote
That's properly known as an OS tax...when Microsoft does it.
Re:OI! (Score:1)
(Yes, pedant-point to me!
Re:How this can expand outside the "bubble" (Score:1)
Any suggestions for doing video work under Linux or under windows? A good comparison between the two at this time? Just wondering..
Re:glibc is bloatware, like emacs and gnome (Score:5)
nop@bandwagon:~$ ls -l
-rwxr-xr-x  1  rootroot   887712Mar2517:35 
nop@bandwagon:~$size 
text data bss dec hex filename
869332 13232 15132 897696 db2a0
That's not to say that an 800k libc on x86 isn't big. It gets even bigger on more RISCy platforms like MIPS. The Agenda [agendacomputing.com] people are sticking with a patched glibc-1.0.3 until they can decide how to rationally compile out features.
In my opinion (which is not so humble after a lot of embedded Linux hacking), Linux is defined as not just a kernel, but also by libc. I can live with all kinds of wacky new kernel features as long as the C library uses and hides them from me. But changes, even bug fixes, to libc can break code in all kinds of unexpected places. Remember when Netscape needed a very specific libc version in order to cope with netscape's, uh, issues?
The people who work on glibc deserve a lot more respect and visibility.
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:2)
SGI can't really win.
They too slack for taking on NT and diluted their market and percieved value. Now in assisting in build up linux, they are building an OS that, in a parallel application env. will outperform their own IRIX kit for the money. (Doesn't matter if you need 2x as many intel boxes if your only paying a fraction of the cost for the hardware versus Irix...).
This is probably a big reason that SGI is pulling out of the ia32 race and are going to soon be only supporting IRIX and ia64 equipment.
--------------------
Would you like a Python based alternative to PHP/ASP/JSP?
Re:Real Statistics (Score:1)
and how many programmers do studios typically employ ? the article mentioned a coupla million lines of code which is a heck of a lot.
Re:OI! (Score:1)
Re:Disney Animation use of computers? (Score:2)
Disney Feature Animation's main concern is to get the look they want for the lowest price or highest productivity.
Let's take CAPS for example. Disney asked Pixar to write CAPS to replace their ink and paint department because traditional cel ink and paint was a huge resource drain. Traditional ink and paint is a manager's worst nightmare: a noncreative department full of people doing a boring and repetitive job, but where the cost of fixing a mistake was huge (because the entire cel (or group of cels) would have to be re-copied and re-painted). To make things worse, mistakes happened often because it the job was tricky as well as boring. For example: using more overlaid cels would often save work (less to animate, less to paint etc if only a small part of the image was moving), but painting them was harder because cels have an intrinsic colour which meant that you had to paint overlaid cels with slightly lighter colours to compensate. Painters often forgot which cel depth they were working at and made costly mistakes as a result.
CAPS meant that this entire department could be axed. Moreover, it added some more flexibility. The final sequence could be tweaked at will, say, if the director wanted that shadow a bit darker. In the end, it made what they were already doing cheaper and easier.
The bottom line is that Disney Feature Animation won't touch a computer unless it a) makes it easier to do something they're already doing without losing quality, or b) allows them to do something for artistic reasons that they otherwise would not have been able to do.
Re:Disney Animation use of computers? (Score:2)
Think for a moment how you'd implement that. It's not as amazing as you might think. (Bear in mind that I have no idea how the CAPS system specifically works, so I'm guessing here.) I'd get the CAPS system to extract the animator's drawn triangle as a separate layer, then fill in Belle's cheeks in the appropriate model colour without that triangle. Then blur the blush (introducing alpha), do some careful stuff to make sure the blush doesn't escape Belle's face, then overlay.
Remember that CAPS is more than just an inker and painter. It's a full compositing system, complete with virtual multiplane camera. Quite a nice system, actually.
Yes, Dreamworks Feature Animation is much better at this. Take a look at the town backgrounds during the chase sequence at the start of The Road to El Dorado if you want to see it done seamlessly.
Re:Disney Animation use of computers? (Score:2)
You're right. I wasn't very careful with what I said. What I meant to say is that the job of cel inking and painting, along with the high cost of error, high incidence of error and high boredom, was no longer necessary.
Obviously I did not mean to say that the CAPS software works without operators. :-) It is also true that they are called "ink and paint" even though they don't touch physical ink or physical paint.
For the record, I've never seen CAPS in operation or read any specs. I'm going by the way that similar tools (e.g. Animo) work.
SGI/Linux (Score:1)
Don't you mean... linux running on SGI hardware?
Re:Spirit the horse, spirit of linux. (Score:1)
You also have to realize that they dont have many competitors. Pixar, Sony, and that's about it (I think). So if they did release their tools they'd risk dilluting their market, not to mention that they probably have significant innovative techniques that their competitors dont have.
SGI's trouble (Score:2)
Not surpriningly most managers who heard this backed away from a high price investment in SGI-machines. Why wouldn't they? Who in their right mind would spend a whole lot of money on a product which the company doesn't even believe in itself?
Also they lost a few good people from MIPS-tech when they claimed to move away from that architecture.
SGI is just picking up speed again with their new processors, 500MHz I believe are the latest.
The manager who said all these things "No MIPS, no IRIX" went over to become manager for Microsoft. I wonder if he'll do the same there? "No Windows, no x86, no
I'd also hate to see SGI go, but I wouldn't count them out just yet. They have a good technical solution and could make it, with enough good press. They are, after all, _outstanding_ when it comes to high-performance-computing.
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:1)
Final Fantasy (the movie)
-Legion
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:1)
It seems to me that a mature Office suite and some of the features included in XP (no, not BSOD's) that make the system easier for to use for the average bear are what will win the desktop war. In the meantime though, it is nice to see that the Linux continues to make inroads where it can. Equally nice to see that Dreamworks did contribute back some of the code back to the community.
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:1)
Re:AMD Answer?? (Score:1)
Re:AMD Answer?? (Score:1)
Re:Render farms??.. (Score:2)
(OK: so, it's functionally equivalent to a chimney in terms of heat output, but that's not what it is.
--
Re:AMD Answer?? (Score:1)
Actually, that was the exact same point I was going to bring up. But, I have a far more interesting question to pose to Slashdot and Dreamsworks...
Why didn't Dreamworks go with a renderfarm of G4 Macintoshes running OSX?
This is seriously not meant to be a flame of any kind...The kind of rendering that they are doing is perfectly suited for the G4, with Altivec optimization even better and OSX being Unix, things should have been great for them. The PowerPC (both single and dual solutions), memory bandwidths, and overall hardware seems like a FAR better solution than any Intel solution. And since OSX comes with the Mac, the price of the OS is moot. I know they mentioned proprietary Unix solutions, but OSX is not exactly proprietary, just the GUI.
The twilight of SGI (Score:2)
Despite all this, they got Maya right. Maya represents something that almost never happens in either business or programming. SGI bought Alias and Wavefront. which were separate companies selling incompatible animation systems. They then had them develop a new system with the best of both systems. This actually worked, and Maya is a good system, although hard to use.
Think about this for a moment. SGI actually got synergy from a merger. That is incredibly rare.
During this period, softimage|3D, the previous leader, was sold off by Microsoft and bought by Alias, many people left, and the new softimage|XSI is years late.
Re:Disney Animation use of computers? (Score:2)
Re:something the article missed (Score:2)
Re:OMG its you! (Score:2)
Re:Disney Animation use of computers? (Score:2)
Re:Excellent article (Score:1)
Re:SGI is stupid (Score:1)
It's sad to see Silicon Graphics go (Score:1)
All hail Silicon Graphics!
(big words from a Sun employee)
-Mike, writing from an NT box, situated to the right of his two Silicon Graphics machines.
Re:Hypocrisy -Rank Stupidity or stupid excuse (Score:1)
Ugh, that's one of the lamest series of excuses I've ever heard from a vendor.
A friendly heads-up for you Adobe: if you think it's just a 1:1 ratio I guarantee you're still *way* low. Revise estimates upwards! Sorry that you were the last to know. Maybe you do know but you don't want admit how bad it really is...
This is really a classic case of cutting your nose off to spite your face. "We will cling to a slender snapping reed of a platform and stand in the way of a rampaging monopoly without providing ourselves with any other defense because we are afraid of being pirated".
OMG, as IF the Windows and Macintosh user communities didn't think nothing of pirating your wares already!
It all depends on you and how you sell the product, Adobe. If you are aiming at the LCD Windows consumer market (Where BTW you are going to eventually be devoured by the local deity) you are going to have trouble just reaching parity in legit copies v. scammed ones. That big fat demographic which looks like a huge market, can't use even your product because it's too hard for them to understand in basic operation. The power users on that Win32 platform on the other hand will pirate your applications gladly, taking advantage of the relatively low threshold to installation you are enticing the masses with. (While you were dithering over the question Gnome or KDE did this ever occur to you? ) That's the nature of the PC/Windows market. As for watered down versions of Photoshop ... you don't really think you're going to compete with Microsoft do you?
Macintosh users who use Adobe tools professionally always feel entitled to make a few copies of your programs for themselves and their friends. I know several people who are in that metier; all of them have made at least one pirate installation. Let's not even talk about fonts! Again, that's at least in part your fault, Adobe, for making it too easy to install/pirate the software for which you charge a professional price. As for the long term viability of Apple, I would not take that bet. One day before you know it, it's just going to be you and that wolf...
If you sell into a professional graphics market for Intel/Linux, you can employ stricter anti-piracy countermeasures and the people in that market won't complain about it being "too hard" to install & use your product. If they want your stuff for their work, they'll jump through the hoops, pay for it, register their MAC addresses,hair and blood samples, etc. If they don't really need it, they can use GIMP and be fine. IOW, there's less incentive for them to rip you off on Linux than other platforms, and additionally fewer barriers to using strong license authentication measures. However, as long as you try to make Windrone mass market pay for a professional tool when THEY are the user population conditioned by bundling to expect office suites pre-installed and other software for "free" you are trying to squeeze blood from a stone.
You have a massive piracy "problem" but if you face it honestly, you must admit that none of it is due to users like the Dreamworks artists or other designers who use Linux, or would like to use Linux. And yet they are somehow the problem??
In short Linux is being penalized for the crimes of Windows software thieves. As to the question Gnome or KDE --it's like I told you in God knows how many emails Adobe! (Did you even read them?) Pick one. Flip a coin. Whichever one you pick is the environment people who need to use your products on Linux will use. You are in the RARE & ENVIABLE position of MAKING the first market for Linux desktops. That means you don't have to ask Bill if he prefers Gnome or KDE. Be LEADERS, you sheep!
Re:How this can expand outside the "bubble" (Score:1)
Re:How this can expand outside the "bubble" (Score:1)
mrgoat
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:2)
Then again, maybe not. Your mentioning this reminded me of an article I had read in Wired a while back. Had to go through my stacks of mags to find it. Anyhow, this is the story of one fella who managed to produce some very cheap graphics that were film quality.
The Back-Door Director [wired.com]
The sad part is that the bulk of his work was done on an NT box several years ago. If this same fella were to try and pull off the kind of work he did on NT back then with Linux today, he wouldn't have gotten anything done. He wouldn't have been able to afford it!
The point of my blabbering here is that there seems to be a number of nice apps filling in the low end of the spectrum for Linux. The Dreamworks article illustrates the fact that there's some serious porting going on at the upper end. What's missing is all that stuff in between those two extremes.
What I don't understand is why companies like Macromedia, Autodesk, and Adobe don't recognize the market niche that their product line would fill in? If any of them made moves to seriously support Linux, between their wide variety of products and market leadership, both Apple and Microsoft would be getting REALLY nervous about the desktop market. Just the sales to the entertainment industry alone would seem to justify the move.
Moving away from my tangent... $25,000 is a pretty steep investment for an independant studio. It'd be great to see Linux pushing the envelope in the mid to lower range movie projects as well.
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:2)
While I wouldn't agree with their conclusions, I can see where this paranoia comes from. I have to wonder whether this stems from the popularity of their software, or the cost of it. Even still, the perception from a corporate point of view is interesting. How does a free operating system overcome this?
KDE or Gnome, or perhaps just straight up X, etc etc
Simple enough, just support KDE, because that's what I use!
How long would one continue to thrive if the other had all the really cool graphics applications designed to support it? It'd sure be a bigger boost to either then anything IBM or Sun could manage.
How bad is this situation in reality today? Are there any RIP servers for high end printing? I rather thought the printer driver issue was moving towards being a non-issue. Heck, I thought that was the whole point of the FSF in the first place!
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:2)
I stand corrected on that point. To further clarify what all I was getting at, I didn't mean to knock Maya or the prices they charge. I don't know a darn thing about them, as you might have already assumed. I guess when ya get right down to it, my tangent was the point. The lack of mid-level professional graphics applications, and the hope that the folks who lead in this regard might start into porting apps.
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:2)
That's my whole point. No applications from companies like Autodesk (especially taking into account ALL the other companies they've purchased) and you don't have a Linux desktop as a major force in the market place. As much as I enjoy KDE, there are simply too many applications that I require that simply don't have a *nix equivalent. Free or otherwise. The applications available from market leaders is going to dictate where things are at in the next 2 to 3 years.
Going back in time a bit, Microsoft fully appreciated this notion. They wanted to get folks off of DOS and on to Windows. Most of the major players at that time were quite content with their DOS applications, as were the bulk of the users (as hard as that may be to believe). What they needed was a killer application. They found that in Excel. The users came, and along with them the applications. Those vendors that didn't move to Windows early died. Anyone else recall just how prominent dBase was prior to windows? How about WordStar, or even Lotus 123?
At the moment, Linux enjoys 2 killer applications. Apache and Samba. On the desktop there's nothing that really qualifies as "killer" in the way Excel was for those army of DOS users. The strange thing is that even without a killer app the tide is shifting a bit. What's needed today is for someone like an Adobe or Autodesk to push the water over the dam.
AMD Answer?? (Score:4)
What in the wide wide world of sports does Alpha or FreeBSD support have to do with AMD? Mind you, I don't personally care what they run as a processor, I was just curious as the reasons for going with an Intel solution. I would think that Athlons using DDR would really shine doing this kind of rendering work. Pretty much every benchmark I've seen for the Athlon has it screaming through intensive floating point operations. Especially on Linux.
Re: (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:4)
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:2)
Unfortunately, Dreamworks is operating in a self contained Linux bubble. For most end users interested in visual effects or animation, Windows or Mac machines are far better alternatives.
Only idiots think that open source is the answer to all questions about software (hello, RMS?). I think that your point underscores the fact that computers are tools, and tools that help you get your work done are good.
Linux is a great alternative in places where you have very technical people to take advantage of its free-as-in-beer nature. Things like render farms where you have tons of custom software are tailor made for it.
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Re:How this can expand outside the "bubble" (Score:1)
It may have been the killer app for two or three years, it just took a little while for that perception to change.
The reason the mac's were hugely popular for a few days, wasn't the "killer app", that is a very small market, it was because of thier friendliness to education.
Will a few niche uses for linux make a difference, somewhat, but getting it into mainstream computer culture is far more important if we want to see a significant increase in market share.
The power of linux isn't any one app, its the fact that you have enough tools to do your job. Could you imaging building a house with MS hammer and nails when you realized that you really needed a drywall gun, a few saws, and many very specialized tools?
Re:How does linux help? (Score:3)
Linux: for Professionals (Score:2)
It makes a good marketing point.
"People who spend the Big Bucks choose Linux"
Now if we could only get MS bashing into the movies ... realistic computer scenes with blue screens and the rest.
;-)
Check out the Vinny the Vampire [eplugz.com] comic strip
something the article missed (Score:1)
Spirit the horse, spirit of linux. (Score:1)
All their code should be released under the GPL so that other artists and animators could start enjoying linux too. If only they did this, the post by the A.C. about lack of availability of linux software would be sorted.
"just connect this to..."
BZZT.
Re:Spirit the horse, spirit of linux. (Score:1)
Are you saying that Dreamworks is who they are because they have some custom linux software?
nah, they shouldn't fear that. Their competition already has tools.
Instead of dismissing the idea, it's an interesting consideration that even competitors could collaborate on shared tools.
"just connect this to..."
BZZT.
Re:How this can expand outside the "bubble" (Score:1)
The way gnome and kde are built, they could be completely transormed into specialized environments for certain tasks with a little work.
For PC's which are mostly used for a certain type of task, this would be nice. You could have a special D.E. for gaming machines (flashy openGL stuff, games, tools etc.) or one for DV stuff etc. Just like PC's that only get used for taking menu orders at restaurants have a specialized environment.
"just connect this to..."
BZZT.
Re:Disney Animation use of computers? (Score:1)
In fact, during the production of Beauty and the Beast, the animators painted a small triangle in a dark skin shade on the cheeks of Belle that would "guide" CAPS to apply the cheek blush coloring at the right spot.
By the way, can you imagine how much it would cost to do animation of Pinocchio by 2001 standards using standard cel animation? This movie was famous for its astonishing detail, especially the whale attack. My guess is that it would take about US$175 million in production costs just to do this by cel animation, but more like US$80 million with the use of CAPS and the Deep Canvas system.
Personally, what I really want Disney to do with the computers they have now is to create backgrounds that seamlessly "blend" with the character animation so you don't have the jarring difference between the characters and the computer-generated background. That has been a problem with every Disney animated feature from The Hunchback of Notre Dame and newer.
Disney Animation use of computers? (Score:2)
We know about their CAPS (Computer Aided Production System) paintbox system that was used originally in the movie The Rescuers Down Under, the Deep Canvas system used to create backgrounds that was first seen in the movie Tarzan, and some animation sequences originally rendered on computer (remember the wildebeest stampede in The Lion King?).
Has Disney reached the point (at least since the early 1990's) they are trying to do animated features that have most of the feel of traditional cel animation but with heavy computer assistance?
It will be interesting to see how much of their computer systems that run CAPS and Deep Canvas use Linux as their operating systems.
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:1)
Also, I'd add that as far as "most widely used commercial animation package on the market" goes, this isn't accurate for games. 3D Studio MAX blows Maya away as far as how many people are using it for game content development.
Re:Most widely used my butt (Score:1)
This is already possible with the MAX-to-Mental-Ray connection, as well as the work Animal Logic did connecting Pixar's Renderman to MAX.
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:1)
The decision seemed odd to me (an engineer), but in retrospect, I believe it was largely based on sales. The numbers of copies of AutoCAD sold for Solaris was dwarfed by the number of copies sold for Win32, to the point that it didn't make sense to have high-paid engineers supporting a port that didn't sell enough.
I believe that when these big companies marketing departments decide that the Linux market is viable enough to create the kinds of numbers that the Win32 market currently does, they'll start porting again. I don't believe that the Linux market is quite there yet.
/. NEWS FLASH! (Score:1)
ARTIST SUES COMMIES FOR HARASSMENT
Re:Real Statistics (Score:1)
We currently have 14 R&D programmers, I think. PDI has been in business for over 20 years. We have been developing proprietary software the entire time. That's less than 100K lines of code per year. Not that much, IMO.
Dan WexlerRe:Real Statistics (Score:1)
Right, I should note that I was speaking about PDI in particular, and not DreamWorks as a whole. There is quite a bit more code and many more programmers in all of DreamWorks. The stats on my page are for PDI alone, and they are a few months out of date, as well.
Daniel WexlerRe: :Real Statistics (Score:2)
W are replacing the O200s with Linux/PC boxes, not more IRIX boxes. We do use O2000 for part of our file serving, but we don't have any need for any expensive desktop graphics box. We don't really need anything better than O2 performance 3D graphics. We are much more dependent on memory and CPU. We do require good quality 2D performance, though, which isn't usually a priority for the 3D card vendors, unfortunately.
It would be great if we could get a nice cheap box that had decent 3D speed and was able to display color callibrated, film resolution, 24bpp images at 24 fps. It would be even better if we could display 36bpp, but that won't happen for quite some time.
Daniel WexlerReal Statistics (Score:5)
I work in the R&D department at PDI/DreamWorks. My website has some real renderfarm statistics [flarg.com] and some specific Shrek statistics [flarg.com]. This article was fairly accurate, which is great. You can believe the hype. The entire production industry is behind Linux and is pushing the hardware and software vendors to firm up their offerings. We just had an industry wide meeting on Linux, and the movement toward Linux and away from Windows is clear and strong. There is even talk that some of the high end studios may work together to release some OpenSource tools, but right now that's still pie-in-the-sky. However, the fact that these studios, which previously guarded their trade secrets jealously, are even talking about this possiblity is exciting.
Also, PDI/DreamWorks is trying to release some code under OpenSource. I just released my frame buffer [flarg.com] library under GPL. It is a small, but important, gesture, as it represents the first source code that we have ever released. We hope to have more soon.
Someone mentioned TIFF playback, which, these days is really easy, since it the latest rounds of cards are able to support 30fps playback using standard OpenGL calls. We have had our internal flipbook and quicktime programs working for over a year now. I'm sure the public tools will soon cover this gap. Also, audio is starting to work well. Our tools have nice sync'ed audio playback, which was one of the last things we got in place. We are now placing Linux workstations on animator desktops as opposed to batch use on the renderfarm. It has been a long road, but we are finally there.
Daniel WexlerRe:Disney Animation use of computers? (Score:1)
Hybrid software/hardware rendering (Score:2)
This is rapidly becoming a bit of a grey area; I personally reckon some kind of hybrid approach is going to become increasingly popular in the near future.
Modern graphics cards are designed specifically to rasterise gigantic numbers of tris very quickly; they have extremely well-tuned pipelines in place to do this, and using CPUs for this when there's such great custom hardware in place is kind of wasteful. GPUs have been on a Moore's-Law-on-steroids for a while now, so this is going to be increasingly the case.
I understand that some production renderers work by first generating very fat, 2D renders (eg. where each pixel contains a Z, UVs, material ids, a normal and so on) and then applying materials and effects as a 2.5D postprocess. Pass1 of this approach is absolutely ripe for hardware acceleration, in fact there's no real reason this can't be done right now.
So the question is, how long before the cheap renderfarm is joined by the cheap rasterisation farm, stuffed with nothing but GeForce2s, Celerons and RAM? Anyone?
Re:Hybrid software/hardware rendering (Score:2)
Your point is well-taken, but I wasn't suggesting actually shading any pixels with the 3D hardware. Like you say, even a GeForce3's pixel pipeline can't hold a candle to a Renderman shader. I was suggesting rather that the hardware be used only for rendering scene geometry and it's associated parameters into a 2D buffer. Texturing would only be used for converting interpolated parameters (eg. surface UVs or vert normals) into RGBA values that can be rendered to and then read back from the framebuffer and decoded. The CPU then does a pass over the resulting 2D 'image': It feeds each pixel's XYZ, normal and UV into a shader chosen based on the pixel's material-id and gets that pixel's colour out the other end.
There's still a lot of algorithms that you can't easily map to hardware
True. If a given pixel uses a shader that references scene geometry then yes, you do have to go and do some work in software. At least the hardware gave you had a head-start on that pixel though.
Antialiasing is quite doable too. Since fillrate isn't the main problem when you're rendering a bajillion tiny triangles, you might as well render the geometry at twice or quadruple the desired final resolution. The shading pass can then work at the final resolution and adaptively supersample where required.
The OpenGL case is really sweet
It is now that most vendors have gotten around to fixing glReadPixels().
Finally, a reason to play with pbuffers! I can already see myself switching to a 640*480*8bpp desktop to free up vram for higher-res renders...
Render farms??.. (Score:1)
Re:Real Statistics (Score:1)
As to tiff playback, there is a program called Flip (search freshmeat) that does it. Downside is that it is only from memory, so at tv resolutions, you need approximately 1 gig of ram for every minute of playback. It is written in Qt.
Re:How does linux help? (Score:1)
Re:Real Statistics (Score:1)
OMG its you! (Score:1)
Re:AMD Answer?? (Score:1)
Particularly re: workstations and servers, AMD has just screwed things up royally. Their MP tech has a great deal of potential (especially re: each CPU's available bandwidth), but we are only now seeing dual CPU MBs . . . So. Even even if DreamWorks had wanted to use AMD-based workstations, they wouldn't have been able to.
BTW, the only MP AMD-based system that I've seen if from pogolinux.
Re:AMD Answer?? (Score:1)
1.) not opensource,so you can't customise as much
2.) expensive, limited hardware. (Yes, G4s are slow, and no-one knows how motorola's going to do...)
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Competitors (Score:1)
OTOH I agree with you that to a certain point it would be nice if those tools were released, many smaller shops would greatly benefit from them.
First on the server, later on the desktop (Score:3)
Add to this that most of those shops have developed lots of in-house tools that run on, surprise, IRIX, so porting to Linux seems a better choice than trying some acrobatic effort to make them work on Redmond's.
You want composition software? No problem, you can use NothingReal's impressive Shake [nothingreal.com]
IMHO you may call those pplications which are truly useful to artists. Sure, they're damn expensive, but this is a niche market so that's not surprising.
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:1)
Moving away from my tangent... $25,000 is a pretty steep investment for an independant studio. It'd be great to see Linux pushing the envelope in the mid to lower range movie projects as well.
I said $25k, but that's the price for the fullblown package which would be useful for fully animated features (like Toy Story, Shreck or FF).
There are 3 different levels of the program...
Maya Builder: For building environments (if you've got a big blue cloth, you can use it for backdrops). Cost: $3,000
Maya Complete: Maya Builder+charactor editors. Cost: $15,000
Maya Unlimited: Maya Complete+more features than you can shake a big pointy stick at. Skeletal animaction, real-time materials (as in, cloth effects), and customizable. Cost: $25,000
Depending on the project, $3k should be very affordable. If you're a hobbyist producer, chances are you have another job which can pay the bills...
Disclaimer: These feature lists are from memory. The Maya presentation CDs I have are Windows only, so I can't check them. Same with prices
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:4)
It is available on Linux, and is the most widely used commercial animation package on the market. List of films and games that are made using Maya include:
Final Fantasy (the games)
X-Men (The movie)
Hollow Man
Vampire: The Masquerade (the game)
The Tekken intro sequences
Star Wars
Granted, the version of Maya required to do broadcast-quality work costs in the region of $25,000, but if you're doing broadcast-quality work, chances are you have that kind of budget.
Re:Disney Animation use of computers? (Score:1)
CAPS meant that this entire department could be axed.
This is complete and utter crap. There is a rather large room at Feature Animation where the Ink & Paint department works...and works. CAPS cut down the number of painters needed to work on the movies. It did not eliminate the Ink & Paint Department.
Re:Disney Animation use of computers? (Score:1)
In fact, during the production of Beauty and the Beast, the animators painted a small triangle in a dark skin shade on the cheeks of Belle that would "guide" CAPS to apply the cheek blush coloring at the right spot.
No, it would 'guide' the painters in coloring the cheeks. Then the painters would do the blends themselves.
Re:How this can expand outside the "bubble" (Score:1)
I suspect that I could get great performance out of Linux with almost no software cost, but I haven't the time to put in getting a Linux system up, tweaked, and hardware configured right now. I'd rather spend the time doing video work (that's why I'd like a custom Linux distro with all the apps, tools, drivers and specialized config scripts ready to go to save this time).
If you know Linux really well, go for it. There's a NLE package called Broadcast2000 that sounds pretty good (never tried it). I think a good start would be if there were a web site that people with expertise in Linux and NLE could share their knowledge.
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How this can expand outside the "bubble" (Score:5)
So how to break out of the bubble? Look at how it broke into the bubble in the first place. You see, it's still all about the killer app. In this case, the animation tools are the killer app, because they run faster under linux and the workstations are cheaper, both of which translate into more productivity, which is critical in the production of a movie. Nobody cares if the machine can't do any other task (e-mail, browsing, spreadsheets, etc). The killer app is the one thing that makes it go.
This presents an opportunity for linux. Why are people so loyal to Macs? For some it's the Steve Jobs cult of personality, but for most Mac people it is becuase it is the finest tool for their job. They are willing to put up with expensive hardware, less of a software selection, Steve Jobs ego, and all the other downsides for one simple reason -- the core thing they do, their bread and butter, the killer app for them, is best on a Mac. Graphic design and desktop publishing are good examples of this.
So how does this present an opportunity for Linux? Make a workstation of some kind, for whatever market. Let's pick desktop video. As a videographer myself, I had at one time a HD bay and two hard drives on my computer. One was for desktop video, one was for programming, databases, games, e-mail, browsing, word processing, etc. The deskop video config had nothing else -- I kept it as clean as possible for stability and performance. And this is not uncommon. My solution was a poor-man's fix for not buying a separate PC. I think most videographers would prefer a wholly separate workstation dedicated to just video. So if a bunch of Linux guys got together and created the killer desktop video solution, at a price comparable (ideally better) than a windows one, a lot of people would buy them (relatively speaking).
This would be a good model for Linux development. Don't develop just an app. Develop an environment. To the end user, the environment is not the OS, but the true working space. Create a linux environment for digital video editing. Or CAD. Or whatever else people buy a system to do almost exclusively. Just like Dreamworks created a custom environment exclusively for animation. In these markets, software is a big part of the cost, usually more than the hardware itself. Trust me, these people will see the benefits of free software.
No, it doesn't have the thrill of taking on the giant Microsoft in the home or general purpose office desktop. But remember a few things: 1) linux can at least get to a critical mass where it sustains itself without needing to dramatically increase the number of users, and 2) "normal" (non-techie) people would be getting exposure to linux, and 3) what kind of system are these people going to recommend to friends? I have personally kept at least a half dozen people from joining or staying with AOL by telling them their alternatives. Over time, word-of-mouth works.
Just make the environment good. Make it rock solid -- for people in these type of workstation markets, reliability is huge, and linux has a big advantage. Make it a killer -- if it's desktop video, for instance, make it something that when I see it, I *gotta* have it, because it will work better and faster than any other desktop video workstation at twice it's price.
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Re:Hypocrisy (Score:3)
This is vwhere closed source prevails.
Re:OI! (Score:1)
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OI! (Score:3)
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Re:Wow, Tina Staples is a babe! (Score:1)
Re:Now THAT's an intelligent comment! (Score:1)
Re:The twilight of SGI (Score:1)