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No big deal.

Softimage uses a very cool renderer called mental ray and it has been available for linux for a long time.

Also Pixar's Renderman (used in Toy Story) is also available for linux.

So Maya's softimage is one of the last of the leaders of 3d animation to join linux bandwagon. It's a little a bit strange that it happened so late considering that SGI (owner of Alias|Wavefront) seems to be so committed to linux.

Hrmm...well i don't work at square so I can't argue definitively, but just because I said Pixar don't infer Toy story. Pixar's Photorealistic Renderman is afaik the Hollywood renderer of choice...it's good stuff(tm) if you can figure out how to write shaders for it. Look here for more info on it. They may well have written a custom renderer to do things that PRman doesn't do well (like raytracing), but AFAIK they're using PRman for most of the work. I'd love to read that interview with the producer...got a URL?

-Brian

From a letter from Steve Jobs (http://www.pixar.com/aboutpix ar/ar98/sj_letter99.html):

We are also hard at work on the films we plan to release early in the new millennium. Pixar's fourth feature, tentatively titled "Monsters, Inc.", is targeted for release in 2001. It is a terrific story concept about the world of monsters, where chaos breaks loose after a hapless monster accidently lets a human child into the secret monster world. Monsters, Inc. is being directed by two of Pixar's next generation of directors: Pete Docter, an Oscar nominee for "Toy Story," and David Silverman, the Emmy Award - winning supervising director of "The Simpsons".

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How Big Was Bugs, Really!?

A movie is 24 frames per second so a 90 minute movie is 129,600 frames. In our case, each frame was 2048 X 872 pixels by 4 bytes of color information. This means each frame is 7,143,424 bytes of data. Multiplying 129,600 X 7.1MB/frame is roughly 925GB of storage for the film frames. However, there are many first attempts at frames and also video resolution frames that have to be stored as well. On A Bug's Life, we had about 2TB of storage, even though the actual final frames only took up .925TB.

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(Above quote copyright Pixar Animation Studios)

Maybe by looking at current digitally-produced films, we could determine what works for resolution, and what doesn't.

It can be safely assumed that all rendering was done with RenderMan, the compact-car-priced, Pixar-developed, amazingly nifty rendering package. Last I heard Pixar's was using a few dozen Sun Enterprise (forget which model) machines for rendering. I can't image they'd replace all that hardware so soon (it was used for A Bug's Life). Modeling, I have no clue, but if I had to guess, I'd guess Maya on IRIX.

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Though I know if ayone should do something like this it's Pixar, I doubt very much if it's true.

Pixar has alwredy announced their next project, monsters inc, and I find it unlikely that they will work on two big features at the same time.

The original; was one of the worst flops for disney, btw, very few people went to see it..

even less actually liked it..


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I just wanted to emphasize that mental ray has been available on Linux x86 and Alpha for at least a couple of years now.

Another major rendering package, Pixar's Photorealistic Renderman Toolkit AKA PRman may already be available for Linux as well. I saw a demo at ACM/SIGGRAPH'98

I just hope that the various 3D modeling and animation packages are ported to Linux as well. The Sidefx Houdini port is a great first step, but I'm hoping that Alias|Wavefront Maya and Softimage|3D are not far behind.