What To Do With An Ultra 60?

V_IL_Len writes: "I'm the administrator of a university NT based animation lab. I have a Sun Ultra 60 sitting unused in the corner which seems like a travesty. I don't have any Unix experiece but am willing to learn. I'm not sure what the best use for it is." Read on for more on the circumstances here; perhaps you've tried something similar?

"We currently use Maya. The students want to use Maya because it makes them more marketable. My boss and I would like to move away from a commercial package so the students would focus more on content rather than software proficiency. Unfortunately, the lab is under a grant which keeps it a Microsoft lab for at least 18 more months. My boss and I have talked about at the end of our software license contract moving the whole lab to Linux and using Blender and gimp as our primary tools. Still it seems a waste to let is sit antoher 18 months doing nothing. We don't need a web server because we don't maintain a web presence right now. So the question is what do you think is the best way for me to use an Ultra 60 in the short term? The follow up being, with 18 months to learn and prepare, how hard/practical would it be to create a Linux/Solaris based animation lab?"

Comments

Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your students want to use Maya because it helps them get a job, but you want to take that away from them.

You're going to lose students.

Dedicate it to Rendering?

[ikekrull]

Perhaps you should set the machine up as a batch-renderer using PRMan/BMRT to give your students a chance to play with the kind of system they will encounter in a large studio.

The more technical among them will enjoy playing with shader code, and the less technical will appreciate the fact they can simply submit their render while they get on with interactive tasks.

Asset management is another application that is often neglected in 'school', so maybe you could look at buying or building a web-based system to handle storing and indexing tutorials, documentation, thumbnailing textures and animations (i.e. clips are subitted to the system, automatically downscaled and compressed to MPEG4/DivX etc.) so your students can easily browse a large repository and fetch the items without hunting through disks and CD's wondering where those preview renders they did 3 months ago went.

This may be a mid-to-long-term project, but will certainly make that Ultra-60 useful as a server.

Did you sell your last brain cell for beer money?

[cooldev]

The students want to use Maya because it makes them more marketable. My boss and I would like to move away from a commercial package so the students would focus more on content rather than software proficiency. . . My boss and I have talked about at the end of our software license contract moving the whole lab to Linux and using Blender and gimp as our primary tools.

Are you INSANE? You have an animation lab with software such as Maya and you want to switch to Blender and Gimp? Sure, those are decent packages if you're an amature on a low-low budget, but if I were a student interested in computer animation I'd raise a huge ruckus if some open-source advocate switched the lab from Maya to those inferior tools without a really, really, really good reason.

This isn't a troll. A few years ago I was seriously interested in computer animation at one time and got to wet my feet with Lightwave and Alias|Wavefront (before it became Maya). I still play around, even though my object modeling skills have stagnated. I've tried nearly all free and inexpensive commercial 3D packages (including the latest Blender as of about 3 weeks ago) and none can come close to even early versions of Lightwave. Unfortunately that does matter, as inferior tools put a low ceiling on students' creativity.