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DreamWorks Switches to Linux
tal-home writes "Newsforge has a story about the decision Dreamworks made to port ALL of their front-end servers and workstations to Linux.
Their new movie, called 'Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron' which will hit the theaters in late May, was created in a 100% Linux enviroment, unlike older movies like Shrek and Lord of the Rings that used IRIX servers as a rendering farm. It's a good time to mention that this move by DreamWorks also includes porting the artists workstations to Linux, in addition to the servers.
Redhat and HP helped out in the switch." Word has it that Adobe may be pursuing unix versions of it's toolset as DreamWorks isn't the only shop switching.
Adobe has had an IRIX version of Photoshop since the dim dim ages. It's not a question of porting to Unix. It's a question of porting to Linux.
A beginners' guide to Portland, OR?
If open source is going to succeed on the desktop, there have to be open-source apps. The average user couldn't care less about the OS, and may not even know what an OS is. The way to impress non-geeks with open source is to show them some applications.
Find free books.
After the Dmitry and DMCA flop by Adobe, I will never purchase an Adobe product and I swear to gawd I will save my friends and co-workers from thinking about purchasing an Adobe product. So, if Adobe is finally convinced it can make a few more bucks by porting its apps to Linux, perhaps Adobe needs to correct its public relations fiasco and not with a mere press release, but something more sublime; maybe a contribution to EFF? Until such an event, no way, no how, Adobe --- not on this Linux box. I will not just forget Adobe's mistake and I hope others will not.
"There ought to be limits to freedom"
Well.
Unfortunately there's too many patents in the field. It is impossible to create a software which doesn't violate at least some of them. For example color management is highly protected area. From this background it's pretty simple why there isn't any commercially viable open source options available...
Ville
The entire push to make Linux a corporate desktop system is still too fragmented and too much like a battle of wills. On one side, people lament that there's no Photoshop or Premiere or MS Office, or insert-needed-app-here. On the other, people complain that the open source equivalents are good enough and just use those and stop whining.
You're both right, now shut the hell up and do what you can to make it all come together. Until people -feel- that open source equivalents to the commercial software are better, they won't settle for them unless they're forced to by ideology or economy. What will it take to make people feel the open source projects are better or even equal? I can't answer that, but watch the press. When the pundits start changing tune, then you'll be on the right track. For now, encourage and embrace the commercial applications. They'll do nothing but increase open source market and mind shares in the long run.
If you can code, do what you can for the project of your choice. If not, and there are some of us out here that can't, just keep an open mind and take the long view. Be patient, and maybe give the can-do's a kick in the pants once in a while.
*kick*
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
Six months ago, Adobe was evil incarnate here on Slashdot. Today there's an unsubstantiated rumor that they might port their proprietary DMCA-protected crap to Linux and suddenly they're an Angelic mom-and-pop operation that can do no wrong.
When this lame movie comes out on DVDCCA region-encoded SSSCA copy-protected discs you'll all be like kids in a toy store, and the hell with Dmitry Sklyarov or Ed Felten or Eric Corley and what they suffered through because of companies like Adobe.
You people are the best supporters Eisner and Hollings could ever ask for.
I'm a little surprised they also switched the workstations to Linux as well. In the short term I can imagine that being a real headache, but in the long term...I dunno.. that could be a really good thing.
.AVI, and then track my mouse movements over the movie. While it played back, I moved the mouse around the items of interest and saved that information into a text file. Then I converted the text file into a Lightwave motion file and loaded it into the eyes.
When you do 3D animation (or digital art of any kind, really...) you don't just have one or two programs that do all the work. You have to constantly come up with new and creative solutions to animation problems. When this happens, the artists really get close to their machines. I'll give you an example: I'm a Lightwave animator running on Windows 2000. Lightwave's scene files are text based, which means I can modify a scene without necessarily having to do it through Lightwave itself.
I had a problem once where I wanted to animate realistic eye movement. Doing it by hand would be incredibly time consuming (Not to mention repetitive...) So I came up with an inventive solution. I parented the camera in Lightwave to the 'neck' of the person, and rendered a wide-angle avi from that person's perspective. Then I wrote a quick VB-App that used MS's Media Player ActiveX control to play back the
The effect was surprising! Within 6 hours or so of programming, I had written a primitive mo-cap (Mouse capture?) program that would be useful for a lot of things, not just eye movement. All this was possible because I understood VB, Windows 2000, and Lightwave. This happened to be so valuable that I bought a Windows 2000 laptop so I could experiment more with this technique in my free time.
The reason I'm surprised at the workstations switch (I should say 'initially surprised...') is that familiarity with your computer/OS is key to coming up with inventive solutions to problems. Since Linux is fairly new to the animation scene (on the creation side, not the rendering side...), it's hard to imagine those entering the animators job market would already be experienced with that OS. They'd have to re-learn how to use their computers. That may or may not be a problem, but it's a concern I have.
My point of view on this topic is starting to change after I started to write this post. It is starting to make more sense now. It is a lot easier to get my hands on a personal copy of Linux than it is to get Windows 2000 or OSX. At that point, the brand of processor becomes the least of my concerns, just the speed of it. It'll take some getting used to, but when all the dust settles, I think Dream Works will be in for a nice boost in productivity.
What I did with VB sounds like it'd be far easier on Linux. I can imagine 3D Animators eventually having more and more programming/scripting capabilities at their disposal. With these skills comes a more robust solution for any problems that arise. Hmm... maybe I should build a Linux box now.
"Derp de derp."
If you boycott something you need, it makes a greater statement. People don't go on hunger strikes to improve their figure, you know. By choosing not to use adobe, you say "This issue is important enough to me that I am willing to sacrifice for it". Otherwise, we might as well all go boycott Rolls Royce cars or something.
Of course, your idea of letter writing is valid as well, at least by snail mail. In email form, it probably wouldn't even get opened before its marked for deletion.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
This is much worse news for SGI than it is for Microsoft.
SGI used to own the Hollywood effects houses - anything not Mac was IRIX. Over the past few years everyone has started realising that while SGI sells the biggest and baddest NUMA, some things like 3D rendering are naturally parallelisable to such an extent that clusters make a lot more sense than NUMA. Clusters often mean Linux, for reasons I don't need to get into here. Which is, I'm convinced, the main reason SGI got into Linux in a big way a few years ago - they figured that was the way to keep their current big-spending customers. Remember that SGI "got religion" long before IBM or HP made serious noises about Linux. HP is a comparative johnny-come-lately both to Linux and to serious 3D graphics.
So losing this contract to HP and Red Hat had to hurt SGI. Bad. This was their turf, and we just saw a major failure for SGI's Linux play. Nail in the SGI coffin?
(PS: I just thought of this: it's not a total loss for SGI - they still own Alias|Wavefront, whose Maya software was used.)
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
Well, I think many of these guys were already used to Irix workstations, so a change to linux is a logical step.
Of course, I am pretty sure DW are not running 2.4.9-x kernel, either. Whichever kernel it is, it's been hacked by Alan Cox and sorts. It must be fast as hell if DreamWorks rolled it out on ALL their machines.