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When large companies such as Pixar decide to make a large decision like this, they will determine the price/performance ratios of all the available systems. The overall price includes the cost of all the systems including discounts, support/maintenance and the cost of changing over. Performance is measured using benchmark related to the required task. For PIXAR, this is the RenderMark(*). Ultimately, each system will be reduced down to X dollars per RenderMark. The vendor with the most Rendermarks per dollar will be the winner.

At present, Apple has the most powerful systems. That isn't to say SGI, Sun or anyone else won't make an effort to catch up. From: Sun Microsystems

Evaluating Rendering Performance Pixar has developed a benchmark standard to produce a single metric that characterizes a computing system's rendering power. The larger the RenderMark, the greater the system's rendering capacity. The RenderMark is derived from the elapsed time of a set of four jobs that stress important aspects of rendering: Ball. A ball with shading, nubs, and motion blur Pixar. The Pixar logo that includes complex geometry and typesetting designed by Pixar's Typestry software Magic. A RenderMan marketing poster depicting magician's hats and wands, including lots of texture-mapping Bike Shop. A bicycle shop scene from Pixar's Red's Dream, where one of the biggest challenges is the number of spokes to render

From Computer Graphics World A 1000 RenderMark CPU computes the same frame twice as fast as a 500 RenderMark CPU.) The first Toy Story (1995) used 50,000 RenderMarks for rendering; A Bug's Life (1998) needed 700,000 RenderMarks; and Toy Story 2 (1999) took 1.1 million. Monsters, Inc. re quired 2.5 million Render Marks, more than the first three films combined.

I know...big deal... Sully (of Monsters, Inc.) had over 2 million individual hairs.

Oh, right, it's Adobe's fault. *rolls eyes*

Damn right its Adobe's fault. It's Microsoft's fault that Windows sucks, is it not? It's not Intel's fault that Microsoft is not writing an operating system that runs smoothly and efficiently on their processors and chipsets. So if Adobe isn't willing to optimize their software to take advantage of Altivec and dual-processors on the platform that made their company what it is today, then I say, "Adobe -- j'accuse!"

I have many of the same feelings about Adobe as I do Microsoft. Adobe had a nearly monopolistic place in the design industry (Photoshop, especially) and they abuse it by filling their software with bloat and not actually improving it. They have a history of making their software incompatible with others (see this article). And let's not forget when they sued Macromedia for using a fairly common UI widget.

When optimized for G4s and multiple G4s, software can be very zippy on a Mac. In raw power, they are still lacking behind in Intel, all us Mac lovers are sad to admit. But this article proves that Macs, compared to PCs in their price point neighborhood, can hold their own if developers like the marketing-driven ones at Adobe, took the time to make their software take full advantage of the machine they're working on.

Oh, but you are assuming that this guy is only able to afford 1 Linux box...

For the price of 1 SGI box you could probably have at least 5 or 6 dual 2Ghz processor Intel/AMD boxes on a cluster...And I can guarantee you that small render farm is gonna beat out the SGI...

As far as graphics performance...I'm sure the Quadro 900 XGL would be enough power (if it's not beating the V12 in performance) for whatever is needed...the price is a little steep though (~$1000 for a PNY card)...

As far as raw CPU power goes...a dual 2GHz Lintel box just HAS to be beating a 600MHz MIPS...no matter how much better the MIPS processors are...

As far as that goes...I think all you have to read is this article...where Vice President of R&D for Pixar said...."This is the platform that will replace SGI in the CG industry. There's been a lot of progress made since last year. Nobody is wondering 'if' anymore."

eWeek
Computer Graphics World
Business Week
Globetechnology.com
ZDNet

The wonders of news.google.com.

It wasn't long ago that Pixar actually started to make the switch to Linux, it was reported in several places. Has Steve Jobs given an edict? While it might be fine it sounds rather abrupt. I wonder if everyone is satisfied.

Here is the quote from the CGW article from September 2001 (which requires free registration):

A studio just beginning the Linux transition is Pixar Animation Studios. Vice president of research and development Darwyn Peachey says, "This is the platform that will replace SGI in the CG industry. There's been a lot of progress made since last year. Nobody is wondering 'if' anymore." SGI as a hardware platform is being displaced by high-performance PCs, but the company isn't going away. SGI is actively supporting Linux, both on its hardware and through the Linux port of Maya by subsidiary Alias|Wavefront. Because Linux runs on PC, SGI, and Sun machines, it enables studios to support just one OS. Like DreamWorks, Pixar faced a massive job in porting its existing code. Pixar finished the Linux port of all its internal software, about two million lines, in May. RenderMan command line tools have been available on Linux since 1999. RenderMan Artist Tools, for use with Linux Maya, are now in beta testing. "Porting went very fast, averaging 2000 lines of code per developer day," says Peachey. "The port to Linux is straightforward, where Windows is difficult." Pixar has more than 500 SGI desktops and uses Sun servers for its renderfarm. About 30 Linux machines are in use for software development, and 20 Linux machines are used in production. By fall, at least 100 Linux desktops are expected to be used in production. Pixar's next film, Finding Nemo (release date summer 2003), is to be produced primarily using Linux systems.

Here is the link:

Linux Invades Hollywood

The most puzzling thing is if they plan to substitute the SUN renderfarm, as one of the things they like is that they can pack a lot of power in slim racks (14 CPUs on each last time I heard). Maybe they got more space at Emmeryville now ;-). As recent as last holiday season SUN touted its hardware shortly after the release of Monster's Inc.:

SUN story on Monsters Inc.

Tom Duff sometimes posts around here, maybe he can comment? It's rather interesting.

As far as I know is that they get the software and hardware at very discounted prices, particularly from SGI, Alias/Wavefront and Pixar. With Pixar it seems that one of the conditions for Lucas to sell it to Jobs was to have early access to Pixar's technology, mainly PRMan (and I could guess also RAT now). From SGI they get early access to hardware thanks to their JEDI agreement (Joint Environment for Digital Imaging), I think it's JEDI III at the moment. According to some rumors is that part of the agreement is that ILM doesn't mention other platforms. They get the gear and give feedback to SGI along braging rights. From Alias/Wavefront they are also among the beta testers for all new versions. But in the end they wouldn't give it away as an incentive. Even if it was free if it didn't fit their pipeline it would be pointless.

There are plenty of articles detailing Linux increasing use in VFX. Here are a some:

Linux Helps Bring Titanic to Life
The Little Engine That Could
Penguin Power
Linux Invades Hollywood
VESTECH 2000
Linux takes Hollywood by storm
Linux goes to the movies
Nixed for Linux
DreamWorks Feature Linux and Animation
Industry of Change: Linux Storms Hollywood

Actually ILM is indeed making moves to Linux. Surprisingly they said the Linux was more ready for desktops than servers for them. There were a couple of srticles about this, one in CGW (requires free registration):

Linux Invades Hollywood

But here is the relevant section for those that don't want to register:

Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) is still porting its code and will begin using Linux on its next movie after Star Wars, Episode II (release date May 2002). Director of research and development Andy Hendrickson says, "We're on schedule to replace about 20 percent of our 600 desktops and 20 percent of our renderfarm with Linux PCs in October. We'll be supporting both Irix and Linux to keep from shocking the system. Right now we're doing a lot of spring cleaning, looking at five million lines of existing code to decide what should be ported and what to retire." ILM uses both its own tools and commercial programs such as Maya and SoftImage.

For flipbook playback of high-resolution movies, ILM has ported its Irix Quicktime-compatible player to Linux. Generally speaking, the players that are available for for Real, Quicktime, MPEG-1, and AVI don't do well above 320-by-240 pixels. But with Linux, says Hendrickson, "we've got flipbook playback of movies working at 1280-by-700 pixels and 24 frames per second-as wide as the typical monitor. We're hoping to bring that to full 2K-by-1K soon." ILM plans to release its flipbook movie player, internal file formats, and batch job scheduler as open source.

You can find a couple more references at the website I help mantain:

ILM and Linux

If the statements are correct, that would probably make MIB2 the first ILM project completely done in Linux, but I still have to check. Still you are right for the most part ILM is an SGI house, though don't forget about the Rebel Mac Unit.

In response to the parent of this, while Maya might run under NT and PCs, there is still software that doesn't like Infernos, ILM in house compositing system, Sabre, is based on Inferno. And there are other examples though are probably very specialized apps.

Hell, Industrial Light and Magic just dumped them in favor of Linux.
Says so here.

Ahh forgot another great article, this one from the best magazine about CG, CGW. Monsters Inc. is the cover story: Monster Mash

There have been many previous examples of CG hair in film and commercials, for photorealistic hair. Probably the best example was the remake of Mighty Joe Young, done by Dream Quest Images and ILM. Actually the guy that wrote the hair renderer for DQI, Rev Lebaredian, later made a product based on it called JIG, which has been used for many hair rendering related projects:

Many other FX studios have created their own propietary solutions or used the something like the Curve primitive in Photorealistic RenderMan. Many early project include a commercial with bees by PDI, the Island of Dr. Moreau by Digital Domain, Jumanji by ILM and many others. Other ones include Episode 1 which have many examples of hairy creatures. There has even been CG hair applied to real persons, like in What Lies Beneath.

Though of course Pixar did an amazing job with Sulley's hair for this film. They actually made a presentation this past SIGGRAPH at the FX R&D course. You could probably also get some onfo by looking through archives of the RenderMan newsgroup.

There have been many previous examples of CG hair in film and commercials, for photorealistic hair. Probably the best example was the remake of Mighty Joe Young, done by Dream Quest Images and ILM. Actually the guy that wrote the hair renderer for DQI, Rev Lebaredian, later made a product based on it called JIG, which has been used for many hair rendering related projects:

Many other FX studios have created their own propietary solutions or used the something like the Curve primitive in Photorealistic RenderMan. Many early project include a commercial with bees by PDI, the Island of Dr. Moreau by Digital Domain, Jumanji by ILM and many others. Other ones include Episode 1 which have many examples of hairy creatures. There has even been CG hair applied to real persons, like in What Lies Beneath.

Though of course Pixar did an amazing job with Sulley's hair for this film. They actually made a presentation this past SIGGRAPH at the FX R&D course. You could probably also get some onfo by looking through archives of the RenderMan newsgroup.

There have been many previous examples of CG hair in film and commercials, for photorealistic hair. Probably the best example was the remake of Mighty Joe Young, done by Dream Quest Images and ILM. Actually the guy that wrote the hair renderer for DQI, Rev Lebaredian, later made a product based on it called JIG, which has been used for many hair rendering related projects:

Many other FX studios have created their own propietary solutions or used the something like the Curve primitive in Photorealistic RenderMan. Many early project include a commercial with bees by PDI, the Island of Dr. Moreau by Digital Domain, Jumanji by ILM and many others. Other ones include Episode 1 which have many examples of hairy creatures. There has even been CG hair applied to real persons, like in What Lies Beneath.

Though of course Pixar did an amazing job with Sulley's hair for this film. They actually made a presentation this past SIGGRAPH at the FX R&D course. You could probably also get some onfo by looking through archives of the RenderMan newsgroup.

I love Slashdot, but I feel that this story is insignificant and this really should have gotten through. Linux is making inroads in production studios and that's a very big deal. So at the expense of my karma... http://cgw.pennnet.com/Articles/Article_Display.cf m?Section=Articles&Subsection=Display&ARTICLE_ID=1 18664

I love Slashdot, but I feel that this story is insignificant and this really should have gotten through. Linux is making inroads in production studios and that's a very big deal. So at the expense of my karma... http://cgw.pennnet.com/Articles/Article_Display.cf m?Section=Articles&Subsection=Display&ARTICLE_ID=1 18664

Linux is so very awesome. I just read about how Dreamworks and all the big Hollywood animation departments have been switching to Linux in a landslide. Linux now runs all major Hollywood animation departments, desktop, server, and render farm. Check out this cool article: Linux Has Conquered Hollywood.

Oh, and, of course, Gimp. Gimp does not include colors handling for professional publishing support!!! You can't print magazines with it!!! Waa!!! Boo hoo!!! How many people actually can do professional publishing? What percentage of assholes that repeated all this colors-handling bullshit actually ever made a professional-quality page? In any software?

The most amusing aspect of this complaint is that the professionals already are using GIMP. The film industry has been using GIMP for all manner of things. Studios who worked on X-Men and The Fast And The Furious have been using GIMP.

Linux is attacking from multiple directions. It's infiltrating the CGI houses, although in hindsight this was obvious because of a similar interface to IRIX. It's starting to win friends in embedded markets including NAS equipment (I have seen more than 1 example of this, just in the past week). It's finding itself useful in scientific crunching where the OS is largely an irrelevant nuisance, and I've even helped setup some (minor) boxes in this area. And Linux has always been popular as a web/file/print server.

But "wah wah it doesn't have CMYK support" or "wah wah it doesn't support my WinModem" always seems to be used as "proof" that Linux won't succeed. The word on the street is that Linux has already succeeded.

Just because the majority of readers think that Mesa/DRI is only useful for games, that doesn't mean it's not crucial for several other markets. One of the would be in engineering and scientific visualization. Remember that it's becoming more often for huge Linux clusters to be used in big data crunching applications. But after all the data is processed you want to be able to visualize: how air moves on a new wing design or turbine, a 3D volume visualization of the brain, meteorological patterns, stellar formation, how a car would react on a crash, etc. It would certainly be better for some people if they mantained the whole process under one platform.

The other one is Digital Content Creation (DCC). The most recent example has been the production of Shrek. Though most of the Linux use in DCC and particularly FX have been in renderfarms (which don't require interactive OpenGL accelarated graphics), there is an increased use of Linux as animation workstations. PDI is making the switch, and also their co-workers at Dreamworks feature animation. Many other facilities are doing the switch to use Linux for interactive workstations: Pixar (their next movie Little Nemo will use Linux), ILM (by October they move 20% of their workstations, and 20% of their renderfarm to Linux, and the next movie after Episode 2 will mostly be done under Linux), Double Negative and many others. In October there is going to be a meeting organized by VES to discuss more of the FX technology and Linux. And of course several vendors already or are planning ports of their products to Linux: Maya 4 from Alias/Wavefront, Softimage 3D and XSI by Softimage, Houdini from SideFX already out, Rayz from Silicon Grail and several others.

I guess it depends if you prefer a closed source but vendor supported solution. In oprder for Houdini to be released it was only available from HP workstation with their FX10 cards and they even provided their own X and OpenGL implementation (no XFree or Mesa/DRI). But I'm sure other customers or vendors might prefer an open solution.

Just check the september issue of CGW for the Linux coverage in Hollywood. The current and past issue of LinuxJournal also have some coverage.

Well for one thing PDI uses almost propietary in house built software. They did use Maya for modeling some of the stuff and certain fire FXbut as far as rendering, animating, etc. they used their own stuff. CGW did a report on Shrek. What they have done is that they have po0rted most of their software to Linux. Daniel Wexler, the guru behind their renderer has posted very interesting statistics on their rendering and Linux use. Last years SIGGRAPH had a Sketches section devoted to it and this year there will be a course. VES 2001 also had a talk about some of their technology used. And the current issue of Cinefex, THE magazine of the FX industry covers Final Fantasy in detail:

So it isn't exactly like no info was out before.

Well That is not the case anymore. SPI indeed started using mostly off the shelf stuff, like 3D Studio, like when they did The Craft. But nowadays they have their own R&D staffs and lots of custom hardware. Back in 1995 in a RenderMan course (if I remember correctly), the people from ILM stated back then that they were close to running 50%-50% propietary vs. off the shelf software. After all back when ILM started their CG dept (1979) there was really no off the shelf software, not even workstation as we know them today (SGI and SUN came in the early 80s). Same with most of the CG Animation companies, PDI celebrated its 20th anniversary, and Pixar also creates their own software, as well as Blue Sky and Rhythm and Hues.

If you want to see how much propietary stuff this studios create just check this CGW article about some of the toos created and used in Episode 1:

Yep they used ton of of MEL (Maya Embedded Language) scripts to do a great many deal of things. But it's not like some were a few hundred lines long, but some were several thousands line and in essence became mini apps or plugins for Maya accesible from within Maya and have their mini-GUIs. Some good examples of their MEL scripts use was the CG people walking around the stadium, and the Pods behaviour. And you can get better endorsment than in the Learning Python book from O'Reilly that has a little quote from an ILM TD.

But a ton of other stuff was indeed custom stuff, like their choreography app, cloth simulations, terrain generation, etc.. There are some nifty details here:

Most major FX companies use some form of scripting or the other. After all since most generate RIBs to render on Photorealistic RenderMan, since they are just huge text files in essence you can massage them with something like Perl before being sent to the renderer. At last years SIGGRAPH course on Dinosaur, they showed this clips of their Maya extensions to do the facial animation, and on the Stuart Little one how hair was handled from Maya.

If you just look at the FX houses recruting pages, you can see that there has been for quite some time demand for scripting langages, from csh to Perl, Tcl/tk and Python.