ter swartz wrote:
>
> http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2761566,00.html
>
> Slashdot posted a link to a ZDNet News article about
> how Linux is overtaking SGI and Microsoft's place as
> the OS of choice for highend graphic creation in
> Hollywood. Linux was used by Dreamworks for the
> upcoming Shrek. A great article.
I was reading some lists over the weekend relating to Maya (a high-end
3D software package used by studios like PDI for doing movie-quality
3D/CGI stuff) and heard some comments from people actually from PDI (the
guys who did Shreck; I guess Dreamworks is the distributor?) regarding
Linux. The article referred to is mostly accurate, but gets a few
details wrong, but IMHO in understating Linux' significance in the
industry. Linux is very _very_ big on the server/renderfarm end of
things - possibly bigger than even the article implies. Linux on the
desktop end is not so strong, but is definitely getting stronger and
quickly, again something I don't think came across as strongly in the
article as it is in real life.
Most of the bigger stuios like Pixar, PDI, ILM, Sony Pictureworks,
Digital Domain, have their own custom, proprietary tools that they've
written in-house for doing a great part of their 3D/CG work, although
they do use some of the commercial packages. Tools like Softimage and
Maya are more targeted at the "under the top-ten" type studios who don't
necessarily have the resources to build their own packages.
The good news is that, across the board, every single one of the major
studios is either in the process of, or has already ported their own
proprietary apps to Linux.
That, combined with Pixar's Renderman having been available on Linux for
a few years now, Maya and Houdini being available and shipping on Linux
today, Softimage being available by around Q3, (Lightwave and 3DXMax
being the only real high-end holdouts - 3DXMax because it's so tightly
tied to the Intel/Win32 platform that there is no hope of there ever
being a port to anything but Wintel/32, and Lightwave because Newtek is
apparently so blind to the potential of the Linux platform that they
just refuse to consider a port, even though they now have or have had
ports to Solaris, SGI IRIX and OSX, an odd attitude coming from a
company who made their rep on the Amiga platform) and the XFree86 4.x
platform finally offering a _really good_ GL implementation on which to
base drivers, Linux is either - depending on your viewpoint - a serious
threat to the traditional high-end 3D graphics workstation market (i.e.
HP and SGI, Intergraph and other high-end NT boxes) or is the biggest
boon for 3D graphics/CG studios since the 3D accelerated chipset came
about.
Of course, it's still not all doom-and-despair even for companies like
HP and SGI because they are now offering their high-end Intel-based 3D
workstations pre-installed with Linux and providing drivers for their
high-end 3D chipsets. So even if SGI can't sell you that new Octane to
run Maya, they'll be happy to sell you a 550 running Linux that will run
Maya just as well.
It's good stuff for the industry, and good stuff for someone like me who
likes to play around with this sort of thing (and would honestly love to
do for a living, some day) because the "trickle-down" effect that never
worked for Reganomics is a real thing here. Studios and individuals
write tools to get their own work done, and since the 3D industry, for
the most part, has a very Open Source attitude, a lot of those tools
become available to the general public under some sort of GPL- or
BSD-like license. There is also extra effort put into existing tools,
like the Gimp, to make them more useful to the "big Hollywood"
industry. Which means I have more and better tools available to me to
hone my skills as a home user without having to shell out the several-
to several-dozen grand for a big commercial package until the time comes
when I can either afford one of those big commercial packages, or get to
work with one professionally.
The big majority of the Hollywood graphics industry has never taken NT
seriously as a viable 3D Workstation platform. Linux is a great boon to
the grunts because they can get a real platform, but still make the
beancounters happy by being able to base that platform on a $5000
PC-class workstation instead of a $25000 SGI workstation. And it's a LOT
cheaper to build a big renderfarm out of high-end Intel or Alpha-class
CPUs than it is to build one out of SGI or Sun machines, and with tools
like Beowulf and MOSIX, it starts to look a lot smarter as well.
--
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
$_='while(read+STDIN,$_,2048){$a=29;$b=73;$c=142;$t=255;@t=map
{$_%16or$t^=$c^=($m=(11,10,116,100,11,122,20,100)[$_/16%8])&110;
$t^=(72,@z=(64,72,$a^=12*($_%16-2?0:$m&17)),$b^=$_%64?12:0,@z)
[$_%8]}(16..271);if((@a=unx"C*",$_)[20]&48){$h=5;$_=unxb24,join
"",@b=map{xB8,unxb8,chr($_^$a[--$h+84])}@ARGV;s/...$/1$&/;$d=
unxV,xb25,$_;$e=256|(ord$b[4])<<9|ord$b[3];$d=$d>>8^($f=$t&($d
>>12^$d>>4^$d^$d/8))<<17,$e=$e>>8^($t&($g=($q=$e>>14&7^$e)^$q*
8^$q<<6))<<9,$_=$t[$_]^(($h>>=8)+=$f+(~$g&$t))for@a[128..$#a]}
print+x"C*",@a}';s/x/pack+/g;eval
usage: qrpff 153 2 8 105 225 < /mnt/dvd/VOB_FILENAME \
| extract_mpeg2 | mpeg2dec -
http://www.eff.org/ http://www.opendvd.org/
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 17:49:34 EDT