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Linux in 3D
An AC sent in this link about Linux use in the world of special effects and animation. There are one or two errors in the story that make it clear the writer isn't that familiar with Linux, but it's still a good article about the digital effects world taking advantage of a free-beer operating system that runs on commodity hardware.
Good lord no, what would that have to do with render-farms and 3D workstations? nVidia is gamer cards. ...though now that you mention it, I suppose it is possible that nVidia killed off all the other options. Is there a customary higher-end option on Linux boxen, or is nVidia all there is? It's sure not great on image quality.
Thousands of people rely on the film-making industry for employment. Replacing them with a freely distributed software package seems morally questionable at the least.
Please go re-read the article. A lot of the software that's being ported are the in-house tools that the special effects houses created themselves (the exception was the 16bit/channel GIMP). They are just porting it from one version of Unix to Linux. People would still have to pay for the proprietary 3rd party programs once they are ported to linux (this was mentioned in the article). The only people that are really going to be hurt by this is SGI and the vendors that are pushing NT & NT-only software packages. Given that SGI is supporting linux, I'm guessing they saw the handwriting on the wall and decided that if these places are going to replace their Irix machines with linux, it would be in SGI's best interest to have a linux based solution for them.
Now whether it's moral to replace proprietary software with open source depends on who's side you are on. For the user, open source ultimately means control. Control over _your_ own data and systems. You aren't locked into some other company's vision of how you should be using their software. True people have bills to pay, but it's not like every programmer is working for a proprietary software vendor. A lot work for companies where the creation of software for their products or their own use is just a cost of doing business. There will always be a place for proprietary for-profit software, just like there was a place for accountants/bookkeepers after the introduction of the computer. Technology creates and destroys jobs all the time. I don't see how this is all that different.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Of course not. But once you buy it, you don't have to deal with Volvo (or whoever you bought it from) again if you don't want to. A person is free to buy repair manuals and parts from their local auto part store and do everything your self. To make your example fit, the engine compartment would have to be sealed, only special volvo tools could be used on it, and you would only get optimum performance if you bought gasoline at station that was owned by or in partnership with a Volvo subsidiary.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
It's also not several hundred or several thousand or several tens of thousands of dollars.
For the price, it's positively brilliant.
**>>BELCH
Call it sacrelidge, but it so much easier to import/export via Windows, edit under Linux. No fuss, end of story.
**>>BELCH
Avid bought the company away from Microsoft two and a half years ago, and although I don't think they started the very next day on a Linux port, I'm sure it wasn't too much later...
People have said it before, but the major thing lacking for Linux in Visual Effects is good color management. Mac and SGI platforms have had strong color mangagement solutions for years, and if you are careful; what you see on the monitor screen is very close to what you'll see in the theater. So far, this is untrue for Linux tools, at least as far as I know.
It's a damn shame to see SGI on the losing end of this, but I do think that they've had their day in the sun; and now have to find a new niche or die.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
I just got back from a week at Disney World and one of the things that I found most entertaining was the tour of the animation department at Disney/MGM. I didn't see a single Windows machine during the entire tour. Outside of a couple of Apple systems everything else seemed to be UNIX based. The sight of the ``X'' screensaver was quite satisfying.
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CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
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Vidi, Vici, Veni
yes, there is!
http://mac.divx.st/
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
When I first saw broadcast 2000, I was excited. When I downloaded the source, I was appaled (note, this was a long time ago). The source seemed to contain every lib the software used (most of which I already had installed), which made the source package HUGE. I recall reading some README and the first thing it said was something like "DO NOT COMPILE THIS YOURSELF!!! IF ONLY THE BINARY WORKS, USE IT, DON'T COMPILE!!". (At that time I mostly compiled stuff myself.)
At that I left it alone. It didn't seem to conform to any of the usual GNU/etc. software conventions (and I don't mean any GNU recommendations, but usual habits and ways of doing things). On the contrary, it seemed developper-hostile. So at that time I guessed that it will never become as mainstream as eg. the GIMP.
Recently I got a new version and I must say that the code (organization) looks a LOT cleaner. But it still doesn't look anything like a GNU project (eg. no autoconf usage). We'll just have to wait and see what becomes of it...
What I have to ask is why hasn't it been packaged in Debian? Is there some problem with it? I can't find any reference to it in the debian-legal mailing list...
I doubt, therefore I may be.
"As a desktop platform, it works great, but as a server platform, there are things missing,"
-- Andy Henderickson, ILM
They must be running that new "Bizzarro Linux" distibution.
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Rare Window - free your photos
Bleah. Didn't get to finish that. Let me continue.
Anyway, Cineon uses a 10 bit logarithmic space, where the 10 bits let you capture that extended headroom. To give you some idea:
Anyway, the reason why film people like 16 bits per channel in their paint programs is to capture this dynamic range. Logarithmic spaces are horrible to work with, so you really need a linear space. You pick a reference white and call that "white". Something like 4096 is a good compromise. This corresponds to "255" on an 8 bit display. Then everything above that is headroom.
You might think that picking 255 as reference white is a good idea, since 0..255 is adequate for computer displays. It isn't a good idea. :-) It captures more headroom than you can capture on film, and you pay for it by reduced precision in the range that matters (reference black to reference white).
As an aside, people often quote the statistic that the human eye can only distinguish so many colours. While that's true, people who say that are using the word "colour" in a different way than computer graphics people do. A certain shade of blue is one "colour" to psychologists and cognitive scientists, but it may map to many "colours" under different lighting conditions as far as a computer graphics person is concerned. Plus, in the real world, you can always add more photons. Clamping your range to [0..255] limits the number of photons that you can deliver to the eye, and so it just doesn't look as good. And that, dear reader, is one reason why I prefer going to the cinema than watching films on TV. :-)
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Not as much of it is due to human perception as you think. It's entirely due to the dynamic range of film.
Film has a huge dynamic range. It starts off black and has to be overexposed "mercilessly" (to quote my boss) before it's totally saturated. Naturally, the full dynamic range is almost never covered in a normal indoor scene. Cameras are sometimes calibrated by holding benchmark grey or white cards in front of the lens. These cards are of a known intensity and expressed in terms of a percentage of "reference white", which roughly speaking plays the role of "255" on an 8-bit-per-channel display.
Now on film, the maximum exposure probably gives you 20 times that brightness. That additional range is called "headroom", and you notice it especially when you look at specular highlights on water or chrome on film.
Naturally up in the headroom, you won't notice subtle differences between brightnesses. One of the most popular digital negative formats, Kodak's Cineon format, captures this by using a 10-bit logarithmic space.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Huh? Most of the animators I know pore over what is the fastest video card for the money at a given moment. (I am one, but I don't pore much -g- ) True, most interactive modeling/animation involves working with flat-shaded or wireframe models. However, working with complex geometry in a scene or trying to view your movement requires as fast a card as you can get. Nowadays, it's practical to work with a $200 graphics card, which wasn't true 5 years ago. However, it's still the case that the faster card you can get the better.
Pixar has not, however, released modeling, or animation tools.
That's because they don't make any for any platform, or at least nothing major. They are known for Renderman, their renderer.
In fact, as far as I'm aware, Houdini and Blender are among the very few 3D 'suites' out there for Linux. No 3DS Max, no Lightwave, no ElectricImage... not much is being done on the 'graphics workstation' side of the equation.
Yes there is. Maya, the most popular 3D app used by high-end studios, is in the process of being ported to Linux, as well as to OSX. (I believe the renderer is already released for Linux.) Softimage XSI, another highend app, is also in the process of being ported.
When the Maya port is fully there, 3D on Linux will really start to be more widely usable.
Of course, this is a fair chance to point out some of the differences between types of 3D, and how Linux is used on it.
Most users know of 3D as in the type that Gamers expect - real-time, hardware-accelerated, high-framerate polygons.
However, Houdini (and similar software) is nothing like it at all. None of it is real-time; not even close, really. A 'faster' video card won't help much here, as modelers and animators typically work with flat-shaded or wireframe models-- not fully-rendered scenes like in Quake III.
As a workstation, Linux offers an inexpensive workstation solution for the artists to work with. Many who work with 3D are already familiar with IRIX. With the multi-million dollar budgets these shops are used to having, they go with what works; not necessarily what is cheap. As far as the animators' needs go, they just need a stable, reasonably-performing system and some imagination.
But when it comes to rendering - that is where Linux has really begun to shine. Linux can cluster wonderfully and inexpensively - which has been used to great effect by animation shops (such as the famous Titanic example). Even Pixar has released their RenderMan rendering software for Linux.
Pixar has not, however, released modeling, or animation tools. In fact, as far as I'm aware, Houdini and Blender are among the very few 3D 'suites' out there for Linux. No 3DS Max, no Lightwave, no ElectricImage... not much is being done on the 'graphics workstation' side of the equation.
But rendering tools - from the lowliest student's hobby to Pixar's RenderMan abound in Linux. Again, the vast majority of what is being done in 3D on Linux is a clustered number-crunching supercomputer; not as a Desktop OS on a graphics workstation. But the time is coming.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Anyone with a clue would realize they meant 8 bits per channel where a channel is red, green, blue, or alpha.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Ok, but how would that make the "geek community" any better than the MPAA? We should be careful that in opposing the "enemy" we do not become them.
Note: When I say "enemy", I am not referring to a group, or an organization, but to an attitude, an outlook. I think everyone can figure out what that attitude is. The task at hand is to figure out how to best fight this way of thinking without succumbing to it ourselves.
OK, I'm done now.
He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. - "Big Al" Einstein
A quick correction (quoted from Time):
Digital Domain; "Titanic": 300 SGI machines running IRIX, 200 DEC Alphas, 160 running Linux, 40 running NT. One hundred SGIs are desktops used for modeling, etc., while the others are all file servers of some kind.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
A large blow to the economy?
A small percantage of a special effect house's budget is the software and hardware. Most of the costs is Artists.
Most of the costs for any business is people.
The only industry hurt by free software is the software industry. Programers are not hurt. Instead of working for Micro$oft, they work for ILM or Ford or some other company that produces a real product. Consumers are not hurt, instead of paying for a shrink-wrapped good, they pay for support.
Open source advocates are not communist. They do not seek to change the nature of business. What they want to eliminate is software companies making money in a way that hurts their customers.
Now ask yourself, is Micro$oft powering our Economy . No. They are a bug company, making lots of money, with tons of capital, but our economy would not be hurt if they fell of the face of the earth tomorrow (leaving thousands of out-of-work programmers who go to work for Ford to support the NT boxes they still have).
-Ignore this post, please- NoOneSpecial
I mean, maybe they don't want the help or something, but the source code is available, and I think it's an opensource license. And it's being bundled with professional systems too. But you hardly hear anybody ever talking about Linux as a serious semi-professional or indy-film alternative to expensive alternatives like Adobe Acrobat.
Kudos to the Broadcast 2000 developers, they deserve way more recognition than they recieve. Linux can do not just 3D and animation, it's already a decent system for non-linear video editting too.
Jeremy McNaughton
------ Live simply so that others may simply live.
The 16 bit "hollywood" version of gimp has been available for about 2 years.
http://film.gimp.org/
The GEGL library that was written to support 16 bit images and it will be integrated into gimp 2.0.
To answer the above question about what 16 bits refers to, it means that an image has 16 bits per channel of color, 16 red, 16 blue, 16 green, equaling a total of 48 bits, but in film it is refered to as a 16 bit image.
We have to render all our images out in the 16 bit format(although many get away with 8 bit images). Also all the texture we apply in cgi have to be 16 bit for film.
> "GIMP is 8-bit only. The Hollywood is planning a 16-bit version"
The bits referred to in that article are not related to total number of bits
in each pixel, but instead, number of bits in each channel - those channels
being red, green, blue and alpha. Currently, gimp only supports 8bits/channel,
which results in 24bit images with an 8 bit alpha channel. 16bits/channel
images would have higher quality, since instead of only 256 levels to
present a particular color brightness, there would be 65535 of them. I think
with the new gimp design planned for gimp 2.0/3.0 this issue will be addressed.