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ILM Now Capable of Realtime CGI
Sandman1971 writes "According to the Sydney Morning Herald, specialFX company ILM is now capable of doing realtime CGI, allowing actors and directors to see rough CGI immediately after a scene is filmed. Actors on the latest Star Wars film watch instant replays of their battles with CG characters. ILM CTO Cliff Plumer attributes this amazing leap to the increase in processing power and a migration from using Silicon Graphics RISC-Unix workstations to Intel-based Dell systems running Linux."
"Realtime CGI in Movie Quality" would be impressive, but:
"It's not at full resolution, but at least it gives them something to work with rather than working completely blind after each take."
With all the excitement over ILM using Linux I'm wondering exactly how many Hollywood visual effects studios use Linux.
The way that is worded, it makes it sound as if the processing power of an Intel/Linux combination is superior - whereas it is a matter of the bang for the buck instead.
You can get more processing power with the latter since it is cheaper (I would imagine even moreso with AMD) and easier to maintain. But not because it is inherently special or faster in any way.
I wonder if this will bring Silicon Graphics back into the favor of Intel boxes - for awhile they were okay with WinNT and Intel boxes, but then they dropped all of that - presumably for a higher profit margin and less hassle of maintaining multiple systems (also likely some break in business politics - perhaps someone at MS pissed someone off at SGI).
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Well, as more and more cgi houses move off of SGI (and on to whatever), they are only really left with their server business. It's really a shame to see a once proud pioneer in the industry reduced to a mere shadow of their former selves, though I guess in this industry, its very common (e.g. DEC, Lotus, Compaq, etc). At this rate it's hard to even see them being around in 4 years, a definite takeover target.
/. comment:
ob
SGI (aka Silicon Graphics Inc.) was found dead today at the age of 20. After being a high flyer in his youth, often seen hobnobbing with Hollywoods power elite, the latter years were not so kind and saw him in the throes of an identity crisis. Eventually his reliance on a small circle of friends was his undoing, as he was slowly replaced by more mainstream competitors. He will be sorely missed, as while he was at the top, he was a role model for "cool" in the industry, and helped to usher in one of the most exciting (and abused) technology shifts in the motion picture/video entertainment industry since the advent of talkies and color.
not even close
further proof that commodity hardware is killing innovative companies like SGI, and a FREE UNIX is helping it happen.
Linux is great for a company like ILM which is stuffed full of coders who can adapt it to suit their needs, not so good for many other companies.
That was classic intercourse!
This is, largely, nonsense.
These images are *not* realtime! A PC is not capable of rendering a CGI screen, in realtime, and merging that, in realtime, with a video feed, and then displaying that, in *realtime*.
Say what you like about Linux, or high speed CPUs, or XXX vendor's high end GFX card - the architecture and the tools are physically incapable of this.
If you look at the extras on the LOTR:FOTR DVD set, you'll see people walking around, with a camera on a stick. This *is* displaying real time camera images, merged into a low res, non final rendered, scene of the Cave Troll fight in Moria.
A point of reference - the machine's they are using for this are SGI Octanes. Not Octane2s, but Octanes.
They did that work around, what, 3 years ago? And the Octane, at that time, was only 3-4 years old.
Can anyone show me a PC from 1997 that can manage that? Anyone?
Despite the fact that the Octane is an ancient piece of kit, there is nothing from the PC world that can match it's capabilities.
SGI have always been, and always will be, a niche player.
You would be a fool to buy expensive SGI kit for a renderfarm - buy Intel PCs with Linux. Similarly, you would be fool to try and do realtime CGI with that same kit - that's a specialist task that calls for specialist skills.
This article does not show that SGI is dying, or that they're being thrown out of the GFX workstation market.
This article *does* confirm what is widely known - the once cutting edge ILM are now many years behind people like Weta Digital.
Throwing around "Linux" and "Intel replacing SGI" sound bytes to try and get some news coverage for a dated effects house isn't going to change that.
ILM developed its proprietary file format, OpenEXR
Hmm.. i sense a trend in calling things open when they are actually closed. This is eroding the intended meaning of "Open" in front of fileformats or products.