Slashdot Mirror

Also, I got news for you: electrical problems have been a bitch to deal with for literally decades.
Yeah, Lucas is called "The Prince of Darkness" for a reason. =D Not that Lucas, the other Lucas.

http://ilm.com/inproduction.html

Using the direct link works: http://www.ilm.com/theshow/pirates.swf

Okay... not everything they do is shit. That, and CG doesn't make movies worse... only if it sucks. You can go watch claymation if you would like.

http://www.ilm.com/ilm_services.html

Look at all they have done. While some of the stuff on there may have sucked... there is some really fucking good stuff on there.

Also, if I remember correctly, they were some of the first to experiment with particle renders for CG (they used it in the Mask to create some of the storm/tornado transformations). Anyways... thats all aside from the point

Hey... more power to em. They get cooler stuff, they make more realistic CGs. And when all you nay-sayers are watching a movie, and don't notice a good CG... it has worked, and they have won. Don't fight CG now, soon it will just look like everything else.

“But for cpu intensive stuff it's a bit slow.”

As very many have already pointed out, that was indeed a crap article. I don't want to spend any time quoting it and going "WTF?!", but I *do* want to link to OpenEXR, which is a file format for managing HDR images. It typically uses 16-bit floating point numbers per pixel, which seems to give a decent brightness range. It's cool to watch the same image rendered using different levels of "virtual exposure". It's by Industrial Light and Magic, which some of you might have heard of. I have, of course, no affiliation with either, just wanted to link to something relevant.

The proliferation of windows-first/only plugins is pretty obviously a sign of the small scale of studios using Maya on windows. If Autodesk were to drop the Linux version of Maya we'll probably be seeing a lot of the big studios, if not all of them, dropping Maya.

But, they are going to be at a strict disadvantage in data retrieval and pushing operations-- which is, incidentally, exactly what most servers, such as a file, web or database server, need to be best at! What kind of servers *ARE* these??

Servers you can find in the render farms of ILM. One of the demonstrations was a realtime ray tracing of a landscape. The resulting jpegs were streamed to an Apple G5, because the Cell-based blade server had no high end graphic board.

There are thousands of other applications for such a kind of server. The Earth Simulator is also not a file, web or database server.

On the other hand, even a web server can profit from a Cell server. Look at all the computations a PHP server is doing nowadays. A content management system like relies heavily on ImageMagick to generate the images on-the-fly. Look at all the content servers, like video and audio (mp3) download sites. Some of them are rendering thumbnails or converting uploaded content on the webserver itself.

Database servers are not only looking up entries in an index, they are also doing heavy calculations.

SIMD (like SSE) helps a lot in different areas. A file server could do real-time encryption...

Also, George Lucas pushed on technologies (THX, DLP, ILM, etc.). Also, he lets fans make their own movies (not for profit obviously; he even watches them to pick the best ones), stories, etc. for contests.

A few of us from Frantic Films Software wrote up summary of SIGGRAPH 2004 for CgChannel this past Thursday. It touches on many of the same topics in a slightly different light -- although not at all on open source in the industry.

I understand that open source is a hard sell for VFX companies. Most specifically while at SIGGRAPH I heard Steve Sullivan from ILM speak (at a discussion panel) about how even though they have had many users of OpenEXR and wide community adoption of the technology they have had very few people from other VFX companies contribute back to its future development. Steve said that ILM pretty much had to write version 2.0 of OpenEXR by themselves. Thus in effect they have had the problem of many people free riding on their large effort.

Thus for us, while we do plan on releasing smaller tools open source (similar to some of my past open source projects: ExoEngine and Exocortex.DSP), ILM's experience with a large costly open source endeavor scares me away from trying this with a larger project -- at least for the time being.

-ben

I don't know why people assume that the projects will be Star Wars related. ILM has created many independent shorts (more or less the wayPixar started) over the years. There was Synchonicity at SIGGRAPH 2000, and Work in Progress and The Moving Pyramid at SIGGRAPH 2001. The artists there work from time to time in their own little projects, as shown in the ILMajan session at SIGGRAPH 96. Heck, in the article you can se that they were working on the ill-fated Frankenstein and tried to do Curious George.

You can see a couple of those shorts here:

Work in Progress
How to Make Hollywood Cheese
Work in Progress
The Moving Pyramid

I don't know why people assume that the projects will be Star Wars related. ILM has created many independent shorts (more or less the wayPixar started) over the years. There was Synchonicity at SIGGRAPH 2000, and Work in Progress and The Moving Pyramid at SIGGRAPH 2001. The artists there work from time to time in their own little projects, as shown in the ILMajan session at SIGGRAPH 96. Heck, in the article you can se that they were working on the ill-fated Frankenstein and tried to do Curious George.

You can see a couple of those shorts here:

Work in Progress
How to Make Hollywood Cheese
Work in Progress
The Moving Pyramid

Oh yeah, one last link to an animated short from ILM. I'm not sure if this was done by the same group of people who split off to join Lucas Animation or not.

It was released under a modified BSD license.

Funny you should say that. Battlestar Galactica was, at the time, the most expensive series to produce per-episode on the air, due largely to its huge special effects budget. In fact, the production costs got to be so bad that when the show's budget was slashed, they took to re-using the same dogfighting sequences over and over again, frequently in the same episode, as Simetra notes in another post.

If memory serves, a good portion of the filming of the show (not to mention the special effects) were done by Industrial Light and Magic. This created more than a little tension later when George Lucas initiated a lawsuit against the producers of the show for being too similar to Star Wars! ("Hey guys, great job on the effects for the "Ice Planet Zero" episode. Loved that death-ray. By the way, any chance you could stop suing us?) By the time the courts ruled in favor of BG, the budget for the show was razed, and production had stopped anyway.

When i started working as a developer at ILM, there wasn't really any bug-tracking system in use. So i threw together a quick hack, on a weekend when i finally couldn't stand it any more (isn't that how so many software projects get started?).

Over the two years i was there, it grew, but it stuck to three core ideals:

1. Don't force the person entering the bug to enter anything other than a description. Just allow people to go back later and add details, change categories or priority settings if they want to.
2. Make it really easy for other developers to enter the conversation around the bug, so the discussion and activity surrounding the bug can be recorded with the bug.
3. Optimize the user interface to display the most useful information in the available screen space.

To meet the first two goals, the system was based on e-mail: anyone could just send a free-form e-mail message to the roundup address, and a new bug would be created; then anyone who replied to messages about the bug would be automatically added to a mini-mailing-list. Every bug got its own automatically managed mini-mailing-list.

Most other bug trackers are really bad at the third goal: they take up all kinds of space with management details that people don't really care about. What a developer really wants to see is the descriptions of the bugs, so Roundup maximizes the screen space for that.

It grew far beyond my original plans, in terms of the number of users and bugs logged. The back-end implementation was terrible (no database, just lots of little text files; performance was awful but it did have the redeeming factor that you could just use "tar" to archive them).

As far as i know, ILM R&D is still using it today, and they're running multiple instances of it to support different applications and teams.

You can get the source code and see some screenshots on a page about Roundup, though i'm not developing it any more. A new group of people has picked up the torch and carried it on in a Sourceforge project that is alive and well. Their project is a complete rewrite of Roundup, originally based on a design document I wrote, but now much extended. I encourage you to check it out.

It's all great stuff that allows for rapid development and building (sometimes glueing) systems together.

-danimal

Look either AT the production studios, or behind them. Watch the credits for the name of who did the visual effects.

Some I know of...

Image G - They did most of Star Trek.
ILM - I'll give you 2 guesses as to what they did. And they're pretty big.

Most places like this will be out in california, probably because the movie studios are out there. But don't think just in New York. Or much less just the US. Like a poster above said, the FX for The Matrix were done in .AU (along with the filming)