Lord Of The Rings Being Rendered Under Linux

Along with an adventuring band of others, tmatysik writes: "Came across this article in the New Zealand Herald the other day. Seems that Weta Digital is now moving over to Linux for the rendering work on Lord of the Rings. Two quotes from the article especially caught my eye: [1)] 'We were able to get the SGI 1200 servers for about $15,000 each or $7500 a processor, and they run more than twice as fast as the [$40000] Octanes for pure rendering.' [and 2)] 'Just by putting in a Linux processor, the price to do a frame is up to a tenth of the cost as on an SGI workstation [running SGI's Irix operating system] so the things we can attempt are more complex.'" Update: 08/27 09:35 PM by CT : Rebecca from WetaFX sent us pictures of the team, and the mighty stack that shall render lord of the rings.

Comments

Everybody is using Linux rendering farms now

[Thagg]

I believe that almost every high-end visual effects company is using Intel/Linux rendering farms now. You can't avoid it.

One of the big reasons is that the rendering software is expensive, and it's priced 'per processor', so you really want to have the processors be as fast as they can be. Right now, that means Intel architecture (here at Hammerhead we use Athlons); and Linux is by far the nicest way to use the IA32 machines.

Interestingly, the only company I can think of that doesn't use primarily IA32 boxes for rendering is Pixar (who write and sell RenderMan, the most popular rendering package). They use mainly Sparcs. One reason, I suppose, is that they don't have to pay for RenderMan :) The other is that on a speed/cubic-foot (as opposed to speed/dollar) metric; I'm told that the Sparcs are a little better. I don't believe that, though.

I interviewed people at every effects house a couple of months ago for an slashdot article I never finished :( and every single one was building Linux render farms.

thad

Will the MPAA sue?

[pq]

After all, if these guys support OSS, they're supporting a bunch of long-haired hippies who "beleive in downloading software freely over the internet..." So the MPAA should put its foot down on this one -- if it can get it out of its mouth, that is.

I guess we can all pack up and go home now

[Elvis Maximus]

Lord of the Rings Being Rendered With Linux. Well, that it: the ultimate geek story. No point in hanging around trying to come up with something else. Let's all pack up and go home.

-

This could get interesting...

[Spurious George]

The scene: Frodo and Samwise are following Gollum up the windswept crags of Mordor. Suddenly, off in the distance, a strange, darkish creature appears...

Frodo: "Aww, crap! Not another Nazgul!"

Samwise: "Umm... Hey, Fro, that doesn't look much like a Nazgul to me!"

Gollum: "Then what the hell issss it?"

Samwise: (squinting) "Uh, I think it's a... it's a penguin!"

Frodo: "WTF!!?!?! There are no frickin penguins in Middle Earth!"

Gollum: "It'sss thosssse damn foolsss in ssspecial effectsss! They've ssscrewed up our precioussss movie, they did, they did!"

Frodo: "Hey, penguin! Get the hell out of here! We're trying to make a movie, dammit!"

Gollum: "Curssse thossse Open Ssssource bassstardssss! Thisss really pisssesss me off!"

Samwise: (Squints again) "Oh, never mind... it looks like it is a Nazgul after all! My bad!"

Frodo: (Smacks Samwise) "Dumbass!! Hobbits never, ever say 'My bad!'"
(Looks over at Gollum) "And what are you looking at, you shriveley little gimp?"

Gollum: "That'sss it! Ssscrew you guyssss; I'm going home!"

THE END

--
while ( !universe->perfect() ) {
hack (reality);

Re:The proof is in the power...

[InsaneGeek]

The thing is that people haven't touted Irix as being superior in performance for rendering, for doing the actual creation a SGI mips workstation will blow most anything away. Rendering is just pure and simple CPU, nothing really more than that, it doesn't take a big graphics pipe, just a big fast CPU, as long as the OS can get information from the drives to the CPU fast cool. Infact it running Linux has very little to it's performace, the x86 CPU is the one that is key there. Irix never was the slow point for rendering, but Irix only runs on mips and mips doesn't render fast. The operating system is MUCH less important than the CPU for rendering graphics (most of the time, never make a blanket statement).

Many shops are using commodity boxes for rendering (running Linux, BSD, Solaris x86, or even NT), but for most of those same shops you'll have to pry their SGI workstations out of their cold dead hands.

Linux and it's cost effective is a pretty useless point for most shops these days, the rendering software often costs 20+ times more than Irix does (lastest ver of Irix is $600), the savings comes in that you don't need that extra visual performance for rendering that the SGI system gives you, so you can use MUCH less expensive commodity hardware for that.

Spelling and grammar checker off because I don't care