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Animation and SFX with Linux
Zurk writes "Here's an article with the inside scoop on how animation studios and special effects shops actually deploy Linux in house. Also mentions how the Linux systems are replacing SGI systems at a rapid clip and
some regular user comments on working with linux for graphics work."
Many large animation and special effects studios, including ILM, Disney, Digital Domain, and Dreamworks are all moving towards Linux as a replacement for their aging SGI machines. Only large studios cn adopt linux, because they need to have the manpower to develop their own applications, and the time to train the artists to use them. It takes a lot of resources to do this sort of thing in-house.
If decent visual effects applications were available on Linux (I do NOT mean POV-RAY or GIMP!) then perhaps the Linux user base among "digital content" professionals would increase. So far, Linux developers have shown practially zero interest in developing applications which are truly useful to artists. Where, for instance can I find a linux app that plays TIFF sequences at 24fps?
Unfortunately, Dreamworks is operating in a self contained Linux bubble. For most end users interested in visual effects or animation, Windows or Mac machines are far better alternatives. I'm not trolling, here, just pointing out a very disheartening fact. It is frustrating to see the Linux community celebrate a studio like Dreamworks, but when it comes to developing code, they just don't give a s*** about the sort of work Dreamworks is doing!
Read the article, it answers precisely this question. First consider what the task at hand is: rendering animations for the silver screen, that means hardware accelerated OpenGL rendering doesn't cut it, it's highly probable that you want to do software rendering. You have shadows, volumetric effects, particle systems, whatever, the point is you want to render this at a very high resolution and with a very high level of detail. For that kind of task, hardware rendering, either SGI or PC based, doesn't cut it or doesn't make sense (why would you want to render this interactively? noone is interacting with the scene). Morale: you want faster machines with lots of memory. Compare a farm of SGIs with a farm of PCs with the same raw processing power and the same ammount of memory. If you ignore the memory bandwidth issue, PCs beat SGIs hands down (if you doubt this try to figure out what SGI is doing right now and why they are getting into the IA64 market)
Then there's the "it's Unix" factor. If you are a Unix house (and have been for a lot of time -- DreamWorks is) you don't want to forget about all your in house tools and move to Windows to profit from the better price/performance ratio of PCs. You want to keep using Unix. Linux, for practical purposes, is that. Why not other PC Unices? (Solaris or the BSDs) Linux has better support, both in terms of hardware and software. It's easier to get people skillfull in Linux than the other alternatives, and the number is increasing, which means it's probably a bit cheaper, too.
Regarding the compiler issue someone else mentioned, there are several alternatives, like the Portland Group compilers, to name one. If it is an issue, the studio can invest in this. I'm sure they have evaluated the cost/benefit of this. If they say GCC cuts it for them...
And last, the above post is an obvious troll... moderators, are you awake?
nop@bandwagon:~$ ls -l
-rwxr-xr-x  1  rootroot   887712Mar2517:35 
nop@bandwagon:~$size 
text data bss dec hex filename
869332 13232 15132 897696 db2a0
That's not to say that an 800k libc on x86 isn't big. It gets even bigger on more RISCy platforms like MIPS. The Agenda people are sticking with a patched glibc-1.0.3 until they can decide how to rationally compile out features.
In my opinion (which is not so humble after a lot of embedded Linux hacking), Linux is defined as not just a kernel, but also by libc. I can live with all kinds of wacky new kernel features as long as the C library uses and hides them from me. But changes, even bug fixes, to libc can break code in all kinds of unexpected places. Remember when Netscape needed a very specific libc version in order to cope with netscape's, uh, issues?
The people who work on glibc deserve a lot more respect and visibility.
What in the wide wide world of sports does Alpha or FreeBSD support have to do with AMD? Mind you, I don't personally care what they run as a processor, I was just curious as the reasons for going with an Intel solution. I would think that Athlons using DDR would really shine doing this kind of rendering work. Pretty much every benchmark I've seen for the Athlon has it screaming through intensive floating point operations. Especially on Linux.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What's really impressive with the SGI platform is not the actual hardware, but the compilers. Sure, they do have great OpenGL accelerators, but it is the compilers that makes the difference. And ofcourse IRIX ;), the UNIX choice of all sysadmins.
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
I work in the R&D department at PDI/DreamWorks. My website has some real renderfarm statistics and some specific Shrek statistics. This article was fairly accurate, which is great. You can believe the hype. The entire production industry is behind Linux and is pushing the hardware and software vendors to firm up their offerings. We just had an industry wide meeting on Linux, and the movement toward Linux and away from Windows is clear and strong. There is even talk that some of the high end studios may work together to release some OpenSource tools, but right now that's still pie-in-the-sky. However, the fact that these studios, which previously guarded their trade secrets jealously, are even talking about this possiblity is exciting.
Also, PDI/DreamWorks is trying to release some code under OpenSource. I just released my frame buffer library under GPL. It is a small, but important, gesture, as it represents the first source code that we have ever released. We hope to have more soon.
Someone mentioned TIFF playback, which, these days is really easy, since it the latest rounds of cards are able to support 30fps playback using standard OpenGL calls. We have had our internal flipbook and quicktime programs working for over a year now. I'm sure the public tools will soon cover this gap. Also, audio is starting to work well. Our tools have nice sync'ed audio playback, which was one of the last things we got in place. We are now placing Linux workstations on animator desktops as opposed to batch use on the renderfarm. It has been a long road, but we are finally there.
Daniel WexlerWith todays processors linux based rendering farms are really hard to beat. The two industry standard rendering programs have already been ported to linux, Mental Ray and the famous Photorealistic Renderman. On the artists side Softimage|3D 3.9 is already running on Linux. Porting XSI will be more tricky since it was developed for Wintel (it will create a fake registry in the IRIX version, you get the idea). Side FX has some products running on Linux. Maya 4.0 is also ported to Linux.
Add to this that most of those shops have developed lots of in-house tools that run on, surprise, IRIX, so porting to Linux seems a better choice than trying some acrobatic effort to make them work on Redmond's.
You want composition software? No problem, you can use NothingReal's impressive Shake
IMHO you may call those pplications which are truly useful to artists. Sure, they're damn expensive, but this is a niche market so that's not surprising.
It's pretty clear that this application of Linux is limited to inside the Dreamworks "bubble". It's the OS for custom software written for a machine with a specific purpose -- far different from home/office desktops.
So how to break out of the bubble? Look at how it broke into the bubble in the first place. You see, it's still all about the killer app. In this case, the animation tools are the killer app, because they run faster under linux and the workstations are cheaper, both of which translate into more productivity, which is critical in the production of a movie. Nobody cares if the machine can't do any other task (e-mail, browsing, spreadsheets, etc). The killer app is the one thing that makes it go.
This presents an opportunity for linux. Why are people so loyal to Macs? For some it's the Steve Jobs cult of personality, but for most Mac people it is becuase it is the finest tool for their job. They are willing to put up with expensive hardware, less of a software selection, Steve Jobs ego, and all the other downsides for one simple reason -- the core thing they do, their bread and butter, the killer app for them, is best on a Mac. Graphic design and desktop publishing are good examples of this.
So how does this present an opportunity for Linux? Make a workstation of some kind, for whatever market. Let's pick desktop video. As a videographer myself, I had at one time a HD bay and two hard drives on my computer. One was for desktop video, one was for programming, databases, games, e-mail, browsing, word processing, etc. The deskop video config had nothing else -- I kept it as clean as possible for stability and performance. And this is not uncommon. My solution was a poor-man's fix for not buying a separate PC. I think most videographers would prefer a wholly separate workstation dedicated to just video. So if a bunch of Linux guys got together and created the killer desktop video solution, at a price comparable (ideally better) than a windows one, a lot of people would buy them (relatively speaking).
This would be a good model for Linux development. Don't develop just an app. Develop an environment. To the end user, the environment is not the OS, but the true working space. Create a linux environment for digital video editing. Or CAD. Or whatever else people buy a system to do almost exclusively. Just like Dreamworks created a custom environment exclusively for animation. In these markets, software is a big part of the cost, usually more than the hardware itself. Trust me, these people will see the benefits of free software.
No, it doesn't have the thrill of taking on the giant Microsoft in the home or general purpose office desktop. But remember a few things: 1) linux can at least get to a critical mass where it sustains itself without needing to dramatically increase the number of users, and 2) "normal" (non-techie) people would be getting exposure to linux, and 3) what kind of system are these people going to recommend to friends? I have personally kept at least a half dozen people from joining or staying with AOL by telling them their alternatives. Over time, word-of-mouth works.
Just make the environment good. Make it rock solid -- for people in these type of workstation markets, reliability is huge, and linux has a big advantage. Make it a killer -- if it's desktop video, for instance, make it something that when I see it, I *gotta* have it, because it will work better and faster than any other desktop video workstation at twice it's price.
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Stay in school, kids! Peace out, Dubya
I thought that said "Animation and SEX with Linux" for a second!
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