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I recall an article on WETA. Don't know about the entire rendering process, but they created a program called Massive - it allows each individual character to interact with the environment while still moving with others, i.e. soldiers shifting their weight over unever terrain while still marching.

They are also using Shake from Nothing Real for compositing. Not sure about anything else they use, though.

I recall an article on WETA. Don't know about the entire rendering process, but they created a program called Massive - it allows each individual character to interact with the environment while still moving with others, i.e. soldiers shifting their weight over unever terrain while still marching.

They are also using Shake from Nothing Real for compositing. Not sure about anything else they use, though.

I recall an article on WETA. Don't know about the entire rendering process, but they created a program called Massive - it allows each individual character to interact with the environment while still moving with others, i.e. soldiers shifting their weight over unever terrain while still marching.

They are also using Shake from Nothing Real for compositing. Not sure about anything else they use, though.

Here are some of Apple's other acquisitions this year:

Prismo Graphics
Film Logic
Zayante
Nothing Real

Here's what it is.

Better writeups, please.

• Shake Version 2.4 is now available worldwide. Shake 2.4 software is priced at $9,900. Additional render-only network licenses are available at $3,900.

Their prices may have changed since that press release (gotten lower).

Someone indicated a +200 host render farm; not taking into account a volume discount, a 200 host license would be $78,000.00 to run all 200 machines concurrently from the command line.

It ain't cheap; $4K is a lot to pay for a command line tool.

But then again, shake kicks ass speed wise. Much attention was paid to the I/O and optimization, even in the earliest versions. Once, in 1999 or so, I clocked it as faster to do a compositing operation than it took to copy the file with cp(1)..! In this case the source and destination files were on a remote NFS server, and were PAL resolution.

I'm guessing this was due to its multi-threading abilities.. (or maybe it was the crack I was smoking at the time ;)) It does seem feasable that shake's multi-threading, involving multiple concurrent seek()/read()/write() operations, could easily make better use of the network bandwidth and I/O than cp(1) ever could. cp() is surely only doing single threaded read()write() operations in series. Maybe someday cp(1) will thread by default to make stuff go /fast/.

I have to wonder about buying a 200 host concurrent license of anything though. I mean, unless you distribute your load to multiple servers (which few companies, even big ones do), if you network doesn't bottleneck with that much concurrent throughput, your NFS server surely will. Anyone care to comment on /that/?

If you want to try it out here's the file to search for on the edonkey network: Nothingreal_shake_v2.43.1118_working_full-xforce.a ce

And since they bought out Nothing Real, this doesn't actually come as a surprise.

The camera is probably intended for use with compositing applications like Shake, which can process z-depth information, as well as RGB, and alpha. Great for seamlessly integrating live action with computer generated 3D, particularly realtime 3D

This is kind of offtopic, but interesting nonetheless. Apple recently bought Nothing Real, the company that makes Shake and Tremor.

Can you say Final Cut Pro 4?

Nobody will read this because this thread is so old, but I can't think where else to mention it so here goes. Above it was suggested that Slashdot runs so many Linux stories because that's what gets submitted and that if I wanted to see something else someone would have to submit somthing else. I said I would try to be Johnny on the Spot with some other news.

Well I made good on it. I submitted an interesting bit on how Apple just bought Nothing Real, the makers of video compositing software titles Shake and Tremor. These currently run on Linux and Irix and not much else I suppose. Big time hollywood effects products. Interesting move, I thought.

The verdict on my submission? R E J E C T E D. Don't cal us, we'll call you, thanks for applying, REJECTED.

i'm sure that we will see something like this in the future, but even right now with our 2ghz machines, point tracking is pretty slow.

download a trial copy of shake and try some tracking for yourself. just trying to follow 4 points takes about 1 second per frame, imagine how long it would take to process every pixel (or even 8x8 blocks) in a 30 minute video!

-- SilentTristero

ps: to compiler folks, "kernel" means a small bit of highly computational code, usually with no I/O; not an OS kernel. Kernels to them are things like FFT, convolution, and so on.

Pixar's Renderman runs on Linux, and due to the wonderfully low cost of Linux and the cheap method of build your own machine, renderfarms in racks tend to run linux at many post houses.

Also, Square has entered the arena with one amazing ray tracer. For the white paper inclined, this is pretty sweet. It explains Maya and how it works with their custom app on Linux using Parallel proessing via the Pthread library.

http://www.squareusa.com/kilauea/

With todays processors linux based rendering farms are really hard to beat. The two industry standard rendering programs have already been ported to linux, Mental Ray and the famous Photorealistic Renderman. On the artists side Softimage|3D 3.9 is already running on Linux. Porting XSI will be more tricky since it was developed for Wintel (it will create a fake registry in the IRIX version, you get the idea). Side FX has some products running on Linux. Maya 4.0 is also ported to Linux.
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
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.

Pixar's products supported platforms
Nothing real
Jig

As far as apps in the porting process, Maya is being ported to Linux (should be ready for SIGGRAPH) and the batch renderer is already available, Softimage XSI is being ported (a beta was shown running under RedHat 6.2, last SIGGRAPH users meeting).

Also several studios have worked on porting there on stuff to Linux or enhancing Linux apps. Most notably, the work that Rhythm and Hues have done on the Gimp, and studios like PDI porting there stuff to Linux, and Hammerahead among others:

Gimp for film

So it's allready happening.