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Kieckerjan asks: "A friend of mine, who's an architect, has been appointed a research position at a small university. Along with the job he's been assigned a budget to spend on whatever he thinks is necessary to get the job done. One of the things he needs is a fast machine to run Maya. As he is fed up with Wintel systems, he's been looking into alternatives. His eye fell on SGI's Fuel workstation, which costs about 15.000 EURO. For that kind of money you can buy a seriously bad-assed pentium-based system, and run Linux on it. His question to me was: is it worthwhile to shell out the extra money for a SGI system? Since I have no experience with modern SGI's, I am in no position to judge about performance differences, but maybe someone on this forum does."

donglekey writes "The software used by Weta to output scenes to be rendered on the LOTR trilogy has been made open source under the Mozilla license. Called Liquid, it outputs from Maya to any Renderman compliant renderer. This is extremely good news as it may quickly become a standard in high end 3D, as well as greasing the wheels for Aqsis, a GPLed Renderman renderer."

Dean Siren asks: "When will mainstream moviemakers, such as Lucasfilm, finally replace their render farms and Renderman with a GPU (Geforce or Radeon) and Cg based renderer? Would the savings in equipment cost and rendering time be worth the learning curve? Is anyone developing such an app? We've had the tech for years with video games, but the art form hasn't really been tried. Is anyone working on this now?" An interesting thought, and it puts an interesting spin on the old computers-will-replace-actors argument. It also means good planning ahead of time, since there will be no "post-production" stage where you can clean up the mistakes, and perform the minute adjustments needed to make things just right. Do you think such an art form will ever catch on in Hollywood, or will small shops have to be the ones to pioneer this before others follow suit?

"There's a forum called Machinima whose main idea is that not only should the final rendering of a movie be generated in real time, but so should the animation, implying that computer animation should be performed, maybe even improvised, live by motion captured voice actors. Accomplishing this goal would require replacing not only Renderman but Maya and Softimage as well. A developer named Strange Company took the challenge and started writing an app in this direction called Lithtech Film Producer (interview here). They even made easy porting a high priority. But they soon realized that they were tiny and the project was huge so they quit. But the idea of improv animation is full of potential."

Gribflex writes "There's good news today for those of us who are heavy into 3D modelling and animation. Alias|Wavefront has released a free version of their popular software Maya. That's right, free." Maya Personal Learning Edition, for Windows and Mac OS X, offers unrestricted access to the features of Maya, but displays a watermark on images, uses a special non-commercial file format, and plug-ins are not supported.

Gribflex writes "There's good news today for those of us who are heavy into 3D modelling and animation. Alias|Wavefront has released a free version of their popular software Maya. That's right, free." Maya Personal Learning Edition, for Windows and Mac OS X, offers unrestricted access to the features of Maya, but displays a watermark on images, uses a special non-commercial file format, and plug-ins are not supported.

As promised chrisd back with his report from the expo floor at MacWorld and a brief note about what Linux can learn from the Macintosh. Walking the show floor at MacWorld, I'm beginning to feel a little sorry for people who are Windows boosters. Where do they go for their community? The Mac folks have MacWorld and WWDC, we have LinuxWorld, O'Reilly and Usenix, but they have what? Comdex? There is no MicrosoftWorld. Whether this is a result of their size or what, I couldn't tell you. But there is a similar feel that the "Linux Faithful" and "Apple Faithful" share and that is that we are clearly part of a user and developer community.

Yesterday, I reported on the Jobs keynote and his ability to expand his reality field to encompass and entire ballroom. Today, do people still feel energized by his talk? Some were still pumped just to a part of the show, gasping and oo'ing and enjoying the melodrama of it all, but the next day there was a collective vibe of "well, was that it?". This is not to say that they were disappointed by it, but they perhaps wanted something more. The rumors had been flying for months about a flat screen iMac, and since that was what Apple brought forward, it was going to been seen as an evolutional, and thus anti-climactic, step, even if it was daringly packaged.

Many noted that they were expecting a speed bump for the G4 towers, but with Seybold coming up in February, many expect Apple to announce their tower update then to a more professional audience.

At the Tuesday keynote "The Power of X", Phil Shiller and Avie Tevanian talked about OS X and what it means to apple and to the future of the Macintosh platform. Apple is stressing how stable and crash proof OS X is and what this can means to the "Apple Faithful". They discussed the kernel, the media layers, security and the user interface and how it all works together. What they've done with their BSD derived core is really impressive. As part of the keynote, Tweak Films showed off an OS X based deep ocean wave visualization app that they assert they ported from Unix in weeks, with significant functionality gains.

The show floor itself was bouncy fun. For me it was a nice change from the austerity of a Linux exposition and it's focus on sheer functionality, capability and commerce. Large exhibitors included Alias|WaveFront, Adobe (not having anyone at this conference arrested, I noted), FileMaker pro, Microsoft and a number of other software development houses. As I walked the floor, I made a mental note of applications that were available for both Windows and the Macintosh. The reality is that there isn't much that is specifically for the Mac intosh, with the obvious exception of the hardware from apple, with all the vendors one ends up asking, what is unique here?

What Apple has that is unique, and sadly Windows and Linux both lack, is cohesion. Everyone with devices and software for the Mac seem to work so well with each other and the OS. We should strive to emulate that cohesion whenever practical for open source software. Before, the apple story was cohesion without stability or power. Now, with BSD at it's core, you can bet that Apple will be able to attack Windows, SUN and Linux on the power front. A year from now it will be interesting to see how many people are running apache to serve pages from their Apple machines, and I will be unsurprised if someone is giving an apache serving presentation at the next Apple WWDC.

Please note that I have posted some pictures of my trip to MacWorld, with some pictures of the new iMac and of the keynote.