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Dreamworks, Sinbad & Linux
Ex-MislTech writes "Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas, an animated movie from DreamWorks Animation Technology that hits theaters July 2, is the first Hollywood production created entirely on Linux. More than 250 Hewlett-Packard workstations running Red Hat Linux make up the core of DreamWorks' graphics platform."
Look at these:
Pixar moves to Linux from SGI
Pixar switches from Sun to Linux
Actually, most of the workstations of the animators are linux.
:(
The animation director's is a dual 2ghz xeon running limux. He told me so. He also told me they'd be changing in a few years, but wouldn't tell me what to
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
Well, there is the Official Sinbad site, and seen as no one else has posted a link to that I thought I should
Each hair isn't drawn individually. What they might have termed "strands" is really a clump that gets it's own outline, and has it's own controls.
If you look at the picture, 16 seems about right for the number of "clumps" of visible hair bundles with outlines. I imagine the CG animation on these is very intricate.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
...that "an entire Hollywood production was created on Linux", at least according to this
Hey, it's even the same company.
A few years ago I replaced an SGI cluster with a Linux cluster. Due to the reduced cost of hardware and software (they even bought from VA Lin^H^H^HSoftware), they paid less to purchase the Linux cluster than the yearly lease fee of the SGI cluster.
And the Linux cluster had at least twice (probably 3-4x) the performance.
Each 'strand' is one curving segment of hair that can be manipulated and curved to a great degree. Compare to typical japanese-animated hair, which has only two segements, the front hair that covers the character's face, and the back that appears behind their face. Yeah, I know it sounds like they only have 16 hairs, but it looks quite a bit better than that. Check out this character picture for a clearer idea of what each 'strand' really is:
w w.wired.com/news/images/full/sinbad_b800_f.jpg
http://a1112.g.akamai.net/7/1112/492/2002091437/w
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Get it right... OCT 31 == Dec 25
The funny part about that "joke" is the number of literal-minded anal-retentive geeks that feel the need to "correct" it, totally missing the meta-joke.
hint: The joke isn't about math, it's about geek personality disorders. It's like going to an obsessive compulsive's house and putting one of his pictures off kilter.
You obviously didn't look that hard, it's also available in quicktime. Both formats, thanks to nice hackers, are very playable under linux. Although maybe not 100% legally... :(
What does a multi-million dollar installation in the entertainment industry do to help Linux?
It means another customer for content production applications on Linux, to help ensure that these applications will continue to be produced
It means another support contract for Red Hat or whoever is going to be supporting the render farm
It means another job for a Linux sysadmin
It means more customers making sure that whatever hardware/software they buy works on Linux
It means more publicity for your favorite OS
If you fall off a building, go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will be like hey, free dummy
I work in one of Europe's largest post production houses, and we've moved most things over to Linux now. However, we still need Windows to run Adobe Photoshop, as there's still nothing suitable yet in Linux. The GIMP just doesn't cut it, and I'm sure it's the same with them.
Sure, the modelling, animation and rendering were probably all done on Linux, but it's probably not correct to say that it was done exclusively on Linux. I bet there were a bunch of Windows or Macs with Photoshop on them being used there, and unless they did all their compositing on Shake, they'll have probably used some dedicated compositing systems.
Linux works quite well in visual effects, largely because all those who grew up using IRIX workstations find it quite familiar. The pipelining and scripting stuff is easier than it is in NT/2000/XP. However, it's worth noting that the vast majority of the actual graphics software we use is still commercial/proprietary - there's not much in the way of Open Source stuff out there of a sufficiently high quality. The notable exception to this is 'Liquid' a maya->Renderman convertor, and to a lesser extent FilmGimp - useful because there's not much else that will edit High Dynamic Range images, but less useful because it still appears to be rather unstable...
1) Spirit wasn't done on Linux. That was marketing bull puckey. It wasn't rendered on Linux, either. There were some portions of the 2D animation that were done in linux, namely the Toon Shooter program and coloring the 2D animation.
2) Backgrounds and some other minor stuff for Sinbad was done in Photoshop, on Macintosh G4. So this movie isn't 100% linux, either. Although now DW is using Photoshop 7 in Crossover on Linux, and (gasp) Windows 2000.
3) 3D modeling and animation were done in A|W's Maya. Dreamworks contributed to both Maya and RH Linux by beta testing and reporting bugs, and making feature requests to both, that were rolled back into the public releases. Also they contributed to Crossover with Disney/Pixar to get Photoshop working on Linux. So they have contributed, a little.
4) A friend of mine at DW got me a pass to see Sinbad last saturday morning. It's pretty good, actually, certainly not as bad as the previews make it out to be - but DW's marketing department pretty much sucks hiney, so I doubt that anyone will ever know that. The animation's not that great, though.
Corrected strands link.
"The first movie created entirely with Linux"
So funny how everyone praises the technology. I'm sure they used at least one or two pencils to make that movie...
Sinbad was traditionally animated, which means a lot of people hunched over light tables, exactly the same way they did it in the 1920-30's. The ink and paint department may be gone, and the effects are a little bit better, but an animator from that time would still fit right in...