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Alias|Wavefront Ships Linux Software
NumberCruncher wrote to us from the rendering front, where Alias|Wavefront has announced that it has shipped Maya Batch Renderer for Linux. The software does optimized tile-based rendering and selective ray-tracing.
While it would be nice to see the whole package on Linux, just having the renderer is still a big deal. Most computer animation studios use a "render farm," which is, basically, a room full of workstations doing all of the rendering gruntwork in parallel. Right now, that's all done with expensive MIPS/Sparc/Alpha-class iron. With Maya's renderer for Linux, building a render farm becomes easier and cheaper, since you can now use cheap, off-the-shelf x86 PC components.
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I'm wondering how much this is a product of SGI's recent fixation on linux support, trickling down to A|W, or if this is perhaps the result of those huge petitions to get A|W to port ANYTHING of Maya to linux?
As for the softi/maya wars, there's a reason Final Fantasy the Movie is being done in Maya...
*snicker
(ps i want to work for A|W! They get Aeron chairs!)
(pps i'd add links but i'm LAZY today)
Speaking from a company that does 3D animation for tv and movies, this _is_ a big deal. Have you looked at the cost comparison of MIPS vs x86? Given the option to render on a from of MIPS/IRIX machines, x86/NT machines and x86/Linux machines, the choice seems nearly obvious that x86/Linux (or even x86/FreeBSD, Maya batch render allowing) is preferred, based on a price/performance ratio.
--Mishka
"no problem"? um, unless:
.rpm, even if you have rpm installed you can't do much of anything with it.
you're using linux/ppc. or linux/alpha. or linux/dreamcast or linux running on some processor i made in my basement using technology i recovered from a crashed alien spacecraft. or linux on any other non-intel processor.
can't exactly convert one type of machine code to another, now can you? so if you wind up on a non-intel platform and are handed an intel
you could just say that software companies shouldn't be expected to go to the bother of supporting/coding for alternative platforms. i say that's a horrible way to look at it. whether the platform is widely used is a non-issue; even if the platform has no users, that shouldn't matter. one of linux's greatest strengths (OK, one of GNU's greatest strengths) is its cross-platform functionality.. once you have the kernel and gcc and hardware drivers ported, any linux program will go over perfectly fine. So linux erases hardware boundaries; makes the hardsware aspects irrelivant. Which is how things should be. If you ship for one platform only, and make hardware relevant in the least, you are breaking something fundamental about what makes linux powerful.
There _are_ ways around it; they _could_ just compile for all conceivable platforms, and then refuse to test the compiled rpms or verify they work. Would be better than nothing, anyway..
and of course they could just do something where the source is available to any user, but not open; that is, give the user no rights to distribute, reuse, or do anything else with the code beyond tweak and compile it.. but of course then we'd have all kinds of flames against them, because for some reason people are angered by restrictively liscensed source code more than unavailable source code. and they would probably refuse to do it anyway. i think there is something of a problem here.
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Just wait until SGI starts selling mid-grade Linux workstations. They already have an X server for Nvidia hardware (in-house only for now, but not for long) that is said to blow Octanes out of the water. (Holy hardware T&L, Batman! I believe it!)
No timetables have been released, but I'd expect they'd have the line of workstations and the Oh-My-God-That's-Fast Nvidia drivers out by sometime this summer. At that rate, we can probably expect a port of Studio/Maya announced-- if not completed-- by the end of this year.
Indeed, with Linux, the question is never if, but when };-)
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The other important point for commercial companies is ease of support. They don't want their technical helpline clogged with people calling because their software doesn't work on some obscure distribution, so it makes it simpler for them to say "we support this on RH 6.1 only" - chances are it'll work on other distros in the Linux world, but they don't want to be bogged down and legally obliged by their support contract to make sure it supports every little thing, and they don't want to be solving problems caused not by their program, but by some random mini-distro's braindead setup.
Remember, many of these companies are coming over from the Windows world -where the OSes (wince, win98-on-dos, wnt) microsoft would have you believe are similar are actually very, very different (apart from the GUI look-and-feel).
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I was just wondering this the other day - are there any commercial quality open source 3D animation packages in development at this time? I haven't really ever heard anyone talking about this.
I'd also be interested in hearing about just any free alternatives too.
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It probably could be called Maya Unlimited (text mode edition).
Assuming that this package is equivalent to batch rendering on the SGI platform, this appears to be a semi-complete port of the full Maya package. While Renderman and MentalRay have been available on the Linux platform for some time, there is a big difference between how these work and how Maya Batch Render works.
I'm assuming that Maya Batch Render for Linux works the same way as IRIX. I only use Maya on Onyx2 and O2 hardware, so I may be wrong about this....
First of all, Renderman and MentalRay are essentially stand-alone programs that read in a generic scene geometry/lighting/shader information for each frame. They do not know how to animate a scene on their own. Neither package is necessarily tied to a particular modeler. MentalRay is available for Softimage and 3DMax, and Renderman can work with numerous modeling apps.
Maya Batch Rendering, on the other hand, is very modeler specific. In fact, it _IS_ the modeler. Let me explain;
Part of the elegance of Maya is the fact that much of it is implemented in the MEL scripting language and is open architecture. You can change almost any behavior of the program at run-time merely by editing the scripting code. (think Emacs!)
In addition, every action the user takes within Maya is interpreted as a piece of MEL code. When you save a scene in Maya, it is saving a MEL script that includes all the discrete steps to rebuild the scene, such as creating primitives, deforming objects, setting up dynamics simulations, storing key information, motion paths, creating shader networks, etc.
The Maya Batch Renderer is essentially a non-interactive version of Maya. It executes a file containing MEL scripting commands roughly equivalent to GUI operations to build up a scene internally, then renders a set of frames calculating any (non-precached) animation data along the way.
Incidentally, Renderman and Mentalray are generally considered superior to Maya's rendering facility. A lot of high-end CGI work is only modeled and animated in Maya, but rendered in Renderman. Paint Effects in Maya 2.5 can do quite a few things that no other rendering package can even approach, however.
By the way, Lightflow is another renderer that is currently available for Linux that produces some amazing images, albeit very slowly. There is a Maya interface being developed for this package so it looks promising.
You're right - it's not a big deal. At least not for the average Linux user. But for companies who produce computer graphics for TV and/or film, the prospect of low-cost render farms is probably the greatest deal they've ever had. So don't knock it.
HH
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We are among the customers that Alias|Wavefront mention as wanting a Linux version of the Maya renderer. But the reason we want it is slightly different: we want a Linux version so that we can run it on our FreeBSD boxes with Linux emulation. We'd love to ask for a FreeBSD version but that would probably fall on deaf ears right now. We already use Renderman under FreeBSD where it works very nicely (we in fact used Renderman under FreeBSD for much of The Matrix). We find that under heavy stress (eg. rendering images at 6k for IMAX using multiple textures at a similar resolution) FreeBSD performs better than any other operating system. -- Dan (aka SIGFPE), Manex Visual Effects
-- SIGFPE
I'm wondering if anyone has seen LinuxArtist.org. There are actually plenty on quality ray tracers and 3D environments all ready available for Linux. A|W is just adding Maya to the list. This should have been done a long time ago, in my opinion.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of Alias|wavefront. Alias|wavefront and Maya are registered trademarks of Alias|wavefront, a wholly owned subsidiary of SGI®.
Keep in mind that Linux is a kernel, not a complete operating system (where operating system = kernel + libraries + utilities). RedHat is the most popular and most-widely available distribution, and i86 is (unfortunately) the most common architecture, so "RedHat 6.0 for intel" becomes a "standard" for people who don't know better or don't want to devote time to testing/compiling for every distribution, libc, etc.
This isn't really that big of a deal, because it's just the renderer - you still need an NT or IRIX box to actually create any content. When they port all of their tools over, then it will be a big deal. (The maya renderer is a command-line tool, and if it was any big deal to port then I'd be really suprised.)
Well, if you can't convert RPM's to what ever you use, then you should be running Redhat. I have Slackware 7 installed, but it is Redhat 6.0 compatable. All I have to do is convert the RPM's to tar.gz and install. No problem.
Linux O Muerte!
I think the reason you see Redhat 6.0 on Intel is because of 2 things:
1) Redhat (weather you like it or not) is the name of linux right now. I know it isn't right but these are suits who write these things. This leads into the second point
2) Least common denominator. Redhat 6.0 was the first libc6 distro if I'm not mistaken. I think all of the other major distros have migrated as well.
Since Redhat was the first name in linux to market, they create on that base. Thus RPM format. Experienced linux users will know to grab alien and convert the RPMs and what not. People who don't know are probably using Madrake or Redhat. (not a negative slam against redhat by any means. I happen to be a redhat user).
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just the renderer?
that's nothing -- side effects software has ported
their whole high-end 3D animation software package to Linux almost a year ago (they were the first), and they're ahead of maya for the big film production houses (they use houdini for: titanic, the matrix, appolo 13, etc.)
also, maya is a bit behind in Procedural technology. side effect's Houdini not only has got the procedural geometry, but also procedural motion and sound editing. check out:
http://www.sidefx.com/product/index.html
john.
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.
who is Ray and why would we want to selectively trace him?
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