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Linux in 3D

Posted by michael on from the jar-jar-binks dept.

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.

4 of 87 comments (clear)

  1. ILM's Linux distro? by schmack · · Score: 4

    "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
  2. Why you need 16 bits by Pseudonym · · Score: 4

    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.

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    sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
  3. Broadcast 2000 by influensa · · Score: 4
    What I'm wondering is when will people start to notice and talk about Broadcast 2000 as one of the major killer apps for Linux. As far as I can tell, it's been written completely by a group of friends, who have also been responsible for a top notch MPEG-2 library and player, and writing a Quicktime for Linux library (sans sorenson of course).

    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.

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    Jeremy McNaughton

    ------ Live simply so that others may simply live.

  4. 16 bit version of gimp by dekek · · Score: 5

    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.