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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.

Linux is primarily used on headless RENDER FARMS

I can think of a few that would beg to differ:

1, 2, and 3.

Of course, given your statements; this info is pretty much useless to you as demonstrated by your statements.

1. Suns and SGI stations were used in 1997. They got old. They were replaced with Intel/Linux and saved a slew of money in the process.

2. They love linux because they can hack it up as much as they want. It does what they want and nothing else.

3. Microsoft tax anyone? Why pay it if you don't have to?

-B

It's a myth that Pixar are uncontested when it comes to digital features (as it states in the article). For example:

(1) Blue Sky Studios made a little movie called Ice Age.

(2) Pacific Data Images made a little movie called Shrek, and also released the 2nd ever computer generated feature, Antz (the official site, Antz.com seems dead).

Here's another myth:

While Pixar's rendering techniques are *good*, they aren't necessarily cutting edge when it comes to technology. Blue Sky uses raytracing for their images. This gives them features like caustics, global illumination and efficient curved surfaces. Curves in particular had a huge advantage through memory efficiency for their render farm - meanwhile Pixar's render nodes were crashing because of scene complexity simulating curves through polygons. Sure, Pixar's movies are impressive, but I can't help but think they'd do better without clinging to some legacy baggage that comes with Renderman.

Anyway - the technology is overhyped. It's just a better pencil. Story, story, story is what counts. Disney can probably afford to take longer developing scripts. This is why you can have something as gorgeous as the Final Fantasy movie and have it completely suck at the box office; and Disney flicks don't look so great, but sell well.

It's a myth that Pixar are uncontested when it comes to digital features (as it states in the article). For example:

(1) Blue Sky Studios made a little movie called Ice Age.

(2) Pacific Data Images made a little movie called Shrek, and also released the 2nd ever computer generated feature, Antz (the official site, Antz.com seems dead).

Here's another myth:

While Pixar's rendering techniques are *good*, they aren't necessarily cutting edge when it comes to technology. Blue Sky uses raytracing for their images. This gives them features like caustics, global illumination and efficient curved surfaces. Curves in particular had a huge advantage through memory efficiency for their render farm - meanwhile Pixar's render nodes were crashing because of scene complexity simulating curves through polygons. Sure, Pixar's movies are impressive, but I can't help but think they'd do better without clinging to some legacy baggage that comes with Renderman.

Anyway - the technology is overhyped. It's just a better pencil. Story, story, story is what counts. Disney can probably afford to take longer developing scripts. This is why you can have something as gorgeous as the Final Fantasy movie and have it completely suck at the box office; and Disney flicks don't look so great, but sell well.

I'm confused. Are you saying that MIT researchers have developed a new "Cyrstal Light" drink mix that changes colors? What flavor is it?


You are thinking of the new flavour of Kool-Aid

dude, shrek was done by pdi/dreamworks. the same people who made antz.

Now, the entire reason why I'm responding is because I have friends who work for a effects company (They did stuff for AI, Shrek, Antz, etc). Now, they are a good company. Fun atmosphere, and guess what? A lot of the employees IRC on OpenProjects.Net. Now.. yes, they may get money from a source that is in opposition to the open source movement but guess what? If you work for a company so do you. If your company has one windows license, then you too are an evil entity in an evil empire trying to conquer the open source movement and spread ill-written consumer-attacking licenses throughout the world! Stop now before it's too late!

Oh wait, that's absurd. So is your argument. They aren't in an employer/employee relationship. They are in a contract. Worlds different. If a visual effect company wants to use Linux+SGI+IBM but their client goes "No, we want you to redo your setup in Windows" you think they'll do it? Hell no. It must be hard thinking everyone is against you, huh?

I know of one computer animation company that is a massively large user of VA Linux boxes, but I can't reveal who the company is.

I don't know how you qualify "massively large," but here at PDI we've been using about 140 PCs from VA for about two years now for all of our work. This in in addition to our 200 dual processor Origin200s. The PCs are 450 MHz dual PIIIs 2U boxes with 1GB. Our new boxes will have dual 800MHz PIIIs and 2GB of memory and will hopefully be 1U. We primarily use proprietary tools in our pipeline, so it wasn't too hard for us to get everything up and working. The toughest part was the UI code and the tools for film resolution flipbook and quicktime playback. We're going to start having our animators use PCs for the primary desktop machine by the end of the year.

A few months ago, the Visual Effects Society met to discuss Linux usage. I can't find the link right now, but a farily strong message was released indicating the industry support for Linux. Although they still do have a large Sun farm, and still use SGIs on the desktop, Pixar too is working with Linux.

We tend to run two frames at a time on each box. That way, they can share the available memory and other resources, and, when we need to render really big frames, we can just run a single frame at a time to get both processors for rendering and all the memory. I think Pixar does substantially similar things on the big Sun boxes, rather than using heavily multiprocessed code. Usually for us, it is memory, rather than processing power that presents the biggest problem.