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SIGGraph and Open Source
There are plenty of examples of open source and the graphics community getting along grandly: Gimp and CinePaint (aka FilmGimp), ILM's OpenEXR, and projects like Open Scene Graph. Linux, in particular, has made spectacular inroads: nearly everybody uses it for rendering, and many (most?) use it as their desktop OS of choice. In the RenderMan user's group (I'll get into RenderMan more in a minute), for example, somebody asked how many people used Linux as their main OS. Plenty of hands, and some approving chuckles all around. Mac OS X? A few hands, and woots. Windows? No hands at all -- and moreover, an handful of boos, followed by everybody cracking up as they realized the whole community was abandoning Microsoft wholesale.
But then there's the other side. All the major visual effects and animation studios -- ILM, Pixar, Dreamworks, Digital Domain, Blue Sky, Disney, and so on -- have a team of programmers in-house. Five, ten, two dozen, or more. They're the ones that'll write the software that does special rendering algorithms for Shrek 2, or an animation control system for Mr. Incredible, or produce massive crowd simulators for Lord of the Rings. Things that commercial software doesn't quite do -- or that nobody else has tried to do, or even thought of. Things they need to do just so. Things they need to do now.
Everybody has a ton of custom software written -- often good software, with flexible frameworks and clever hacks. Moreover, they don't want to rely any more than necessary on commercial software, because if ILM finds a bug in Maya that holds them up or slows them down, they best they can do is pay Alias to fix it fast (i.e. weeks) and then have hundreds of animators waste thousands of hours time working around it for weeks. And worse, if Digital Domain buys Alias and decides they'll keep new versions of Maya to themselves, ILM is simply screwed, in a big way. If they want to get a particular feature in Maya, and a plugin won't cut it? Well, that's even harder -- and involves more money and more time.
So ILM writes their own stuff whenever they have to, and whenever they can. And Digital Domain writes their own stuff. And Dreamworks writes their own stuff. And Disney writes their own stuff.
And most of it is all the same stuff. Fluid dynamics? Hair? Subsurface scattering? Muscle-and-skin systems? Crowd control? Dozens of topics -- and every studio pretty much has pretty similar, rather redundant code to do 'em all.
These studios aren't in the business of writing software, they're in the business of making movies. So why are they spending their time and money writing software? Because they have to; it's a Necessary Evil.
So, what if they all worked on Open Source stuff instead? Look at what I just wrote. Every word is a reason to go Open Source. No drawbacks, all upside: no lock-in, you can fix stuff, you can add stuff, you don't have to wait on anybody else, and plus, you can do all this while also using what others have written.
The knee-jerk reaction that may be some executives' first objection: our code is a strategic advantage, giving it away would be throwing away money. If we can do hair and our competitors can't, we'll make better films then they can (and, if it's a visual effects studio, we'll win contracts based on that unique ability).
Bull honkus. If your competitors need hair, they'll write hair software, no problem. Another quote from the Pixar RenderMan user's group, this one by a RenderMan developer (paraphrased): "this is based on the subsurface scattering papers from a couple years ago. Everybody does this, based on those papers." Nope, I don't see strategic advantage there: I see waste.
It is, as they say, a win-win scenario; the studios contribute their code to Open Source projects, and everybody helps make that code better. ILM started it in a small way, with OpenEXR, and it worked: OpenEXR is *the* format for high-dynamic-range images, no questions asked. Did it benefit ILM? You betcha: major packages everywhere (Photoshop, RenderMan, etc) either import/export OpenEXR now, or will soon. Pixar even contributed new compression code.
So, a great scenario, and proof that it works. Why hasn't it happened in a bigger way yet? Fear of the unknown. But listen close, and you'll hear a flood coming that could change the landscape -- and it's hard to divert a flood.
That leaves only one question: how will it start? Well, it could begin with open source projects becoming valuable to studios, as started happening with Gimp (though here I'm talking more about advanced 3D animation, simulation, and rendering; Blender's great for what it does, but medium-to-large studios aren't its intended audience; it's not going to displace Maya any time soon, because it doesn't offer anything that Maya lacks as far as the studios are concerned). Or it could start with a studio making a bunch of their custom in-house software Open Source (like ILM did with OpenEXR). Either way, it's up to us as a community -- either to write the software or to sell the concept.
I'd suggest that a great place for all this to start would be with Pixar's PRMan (PhotoRealistic RenderMan, these days often called just RenderMan). And note I say this as a shareholder. Selling RenderMan and related software accounts for less than 5% of Pixar's revenue; the real reason -- the *only* business reason -- they still develop it is for the other 95% of the company to use. If open-sourcing it would bring in collaboration and improvements that would make them just 5% more efficient in generating movie revenue, doesn't that justify the decision right there? And of course that's not counting those who would still pay for service contracts, or the reduction in development costs that could come from the rest of the community helping with their R&D (the budget for which, BTW, surpasses their software revenue). RenderMan has always been a product ahead of its time, and that's why -- despite Pixar's belligerent and hostile use of patents and close-held IP -- it's still the golden standard in this industry. The RenderMan protocol and API was intended fifteen years ago to be a renderer-independent standard, the PostScript of the 3D world. That dream died because of Pixar's unwillingness to release IP: it became difficult or impossible for others to implement that standard officially, or at all, because Pixar grasped the it so tightly (case in point, ExLuna: their lawyers summarily killed what was the best chance in years of having a RenderMan-compliant renderer with new and different functionality, complementary to PRMan). But the renderer -- PRMan -- doesn't have to die through the same mistake, even in the face of an ever-shrinking market share and competitors with the advanced global illumination algorithms PRMan lacks.
But that's not to say Pixar is the only -- or even the best or most likely -- option here. They most certainly don't hold all the cards. So, don't sit back and wait for Pixar or another studio to start the ball rolling: we need to give it a push.
Pretty colors
It's great to see movie houses coming to the realization that sharing development tasks helps everyone; I hope people in other industries come to this realization too.
I've worked at several companies now where I saw a tremendous amount of effort invested in developing custom, proprietary solutions to relatively common problems outside the company's primary business domain. (In some cases, this meant duplicating the exact functionality of existing free software.) Since ten programmers can't outdo a thousand, inevitably the result was buggy, half-baked work that the rest of us employees had to limp along with, or find workarounds for.
Keep the software that drives your core business proprietary, if you like; but why not co-operate on all the non-core stuff that merely keeps the business going? It just makes sense.
doesn't seem a sensible proposition to me. i'm sure open source has it's place, but this seems over the top.
Wow! 30 times brighter and 10 times darker than a normal display. Anybody got a screen shot?
hum... didn't know linux was so popular? At my university the graphic professor is doing all this work on windows... and he has plenty of cool stuff done.
If I had known I would've purchased a Nvidia card over an ATI.
This one guy who wrote the article is speculating that Open Source will be big in the film industry. No big movie houses. Not Pixar. Just this guy SeanCier. Who the hell is he?
This is just an opinion piece, not news.
Way to put the programmers that write this "redundant" software out of their _paying_ jobs. Just remember, the studios aren't doing this for the good and benefit of humanity, they're doing it to save a few bucks. If this was a story about outsourcing jobs to India, they'd be getting flamed rather than applauded.
This isn't just true for graphics. Every industry can benefit from sharing at least some of their work.
In a lot of cases, the reason stuff isn't open source is because the people who believe in it aren't management and simply don't want to go through the trouble of convincing so many people when their paycheck won't increase as a result.
There was a panel about the role of custom software development in VFX houses. Though it seems like a good idea on the surface, none of the four big houses represented seemed particularly keen to move towards open source. Most of reasons come down to competition - sure they are all building the same things, but the differences between how well and rapidly they build them determine whether they win contracts over their competitors. Simple business, just as all the big competing auto manufacturers are building the same type of components, but they're not rushing to share their designs...
And the benefits are not as clear as it would seem - the best case seems to be OpenEXR, but the ILM guy was disappointed by the lack of community contributions, that most of the work on the new version had to come from within ILM, and the initial packaging work had cost them more than expected.
Also mentioned were the risks associated by opening their source, particularly the patent issues. I'm sure SCO has persuaded a few companies not to open sources just in case they get involved in that kind of opportunistic farce.
So, in some idealistic collaborative future, a lot could be done with open source, but in the real competitive one, it will be slow progress...
i think you missed the whole point, but that's ok since you have your head shoved so far up your ass you would miss the obvious, obviously.
Back in the old days, Blue Moon (I think that was it) had a Renderman package you could download. The person that did it ended up getting hired by Pixar, and has been there to this day.
Here's the thing.... Pixar isn't going to open source Renderman. They just aren't. The best bet is to get a group of people together and create their own open source version of it. It's been done before, and it can be done again.
As a student, I use Pixar's tools - Renderman Artist Tools 6.0 and Renderman Pro Server 11.5.3, plugged into Maya 5.0.1.
Why did I start using these tools? Maya's Fur renderer was (and still is) a complete piece of shit. No offense to anyone who's actually gotten it to work well, but... damn. If you've ever used it, you'll know what I'm talking about, specifically in regards to the lighting, and trying to match it to the rest of your scene. And yes, I've tried Maya 6 rendering out Fur in Mental Ray - something about trying to allocate several gigs of RAM just for the Fur, where PRMan would use 800 MB for the whole scene, turned me off from that. And RAT includes a plugin to build Fur out of RiCurves primitives. Perfect match, right? Of course.
Well, it was lacking a couple of features. Specifically, Attractor Influence Start and Influence End (specifying how far along the length of each hair dynamic attractors would affect the curve direction). Thankfully, Pixar decided to throw in the code for the mtorFurProcedural DSO with the toolkit. So I added the 6 (or so) lines of code needed to implement those features, recompiled, and it now works perfectly, exactly the way I'd expect it to.
And then the shading model being used wasn't giving me the results I needed. I took a look at a paper (from a previous SIGGRAPH) on the fur shading used in Stuart Little, specifically in regards to mixing the underlying surface's normal with the hair normal. Sounds like a good idea, think I'll try that. Oops, the plugin doesn't pass that information to the shader. 10 lines of code later - a new shader variable, surface_normal, has been added. And after modifying a shader to take advantage of that (loosely based on the example code in the paper), the shading looks infinitely better than anything I EVER got out of Maya. Score another point for having the source.
Unfortunately, there was also another bug, this time in the mtor_maya5 plugin (which, being the bulk of the product, is NOT open source). I had to reimplement the command that the mtorUltraFur RIBGen plugin was using to dump the surface information (for each uv coord: x, y, z, normal vector, u vector, v vector), because its handling of trimmed NURBS surfaces was broken. That was irritating, but made possible because I had the source to the plugin and was able to change the command that it was calling (to my own plugin's name). (Though it would've been easier if I had the source to the mtor_maya5 plugin as well...)
So, because I got the source with the tools, I was able to very quickly fix the problems that showed up, and tune them to do exactly what I needed them to do.
Every cloud has a silver lining (except for the mushroom shaped ones, which have a lining of Iridium & Strontium 90)
I notice that the NVIDIA 6800 has 220 million transistors. If they added a few million more transistors or sacrificed a few pipes for a RISC processor, the chip could do all the computation for the system. For people whose only demanding applications are graphics-intensive games, a CPU-on-GPU design might be a great idea. Admittedly, this solution does nothing for servers, but then it does not seem like servers are driving the mass-market PC technology at the moment.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
It was an interesting Siggraph for display technology.
That high-dynamic range monitor was far and away the coolest innovation (it's contrast range is like, 300 times higher than ordinary monitors. When they set it to maximum brightness it actually takes your eyes a moment or two to adapt when you go from a bright part of an image to a dark part).
And modern graphics cards actually have the precision to make a huge gamut like that useful. Hopefully they'll take off and we'll see games start to use it. It really made all of the other monitors look dim and washed out.
There were a bunch of different naked eye 3D displays. Nothing fantastic, but still pretty cool, although headache inducing if over-indulged in. I'm guessing that they'll be used for trade shows...
Another group was showing a projection system with 6 primary colors.
large color gamut display
They ganged up two sets of projectors. One with straight up RGB, and another with CMY (I think!), and by overlaying the two they were able to get a much wider color gamut than traditional RGB monitors. It was very hip, but I have trouble imagining it ever leaving a research lab.
There was also some cool stuff done by registering lots of projectors together to get very large, very high resolution displays, without any visible seams. It would make for a cool game room (assuming that you had a machine that could drive a 4000 X 12000 pixel display!).
Still the high dynamic range monitor is the one that I'm lusting after...
Microsoft isn't going to drop out of the VFX world without a fight. They had a huge booth at SIGGRAPH this year, lots of vapor and FUD.0 4/08-09SIGGRAPH2004PR.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2004/aug
They even hired SGI founder and uber hardware/software enigneer Kurt Akeley!
Pixar has made a pretty good amount of money off the sale of Renderman. Why give up that revenue stream?
Then we get into the issue of patents. A lot of code these companies produce includes patented algorithms which would disqualify the code from even being released under a lot of Open Source licenses to begin with, not to mention the fact that the companies don't want anyone else using these algorithms anyway...
I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for big OSS projects to come out of any of these studios...
As somebody who works in 3D graphics, there are so many things wrong with this I don't even know where to start.
You just don't get it.
Damn zealots are boring.
I'll take one example:
"case in point, ExLuna: their lawyers summarily killed what was the best chance in years of having a RenderMan"
Um - no. PIXAR killed ExLuna. They sued them into the ground. Then even took the nasty step of not only suing the company, but suing the founder (Larry Gritz) and others. Hello - software patents? And even though ExLuna claimed they weren't violating them, it was easier to settle than fight with somebody who could/did crush them like a bug.
(FYI - ILM considers OpenEXR to be a big failure. They've gotten pretty much zero contributions back from anybody. It's only take take take. It still helps ILM because they're getting most other packages to implement the format so they can make their pipeline more unified, but whether that was more or less effort that open sourcing the package in the first place is subject to debate).
I'm not even going to refute the rest of your points because it's a waste of time. You don't get it.
Excellent article. The only problem I can see is what you described as the knee-jerk reaction of company executives to the phrase "Open Source". Even if the only profits the company makes is 5% of the total, executives are probably working on a way right now to increase that to 10%. There's gotta be a return in exchange for Open Sourcing their code. The way I could see that happening would be "tarding", where companies trade their code for other companies' code at no cost to either. Once the company has gotten what they want then they can Open Source their code. The problem with that is that code is now a tool to get what you want, so you wouldn't want to give it up.
Thanks for the link to fix the colors. Unfortunately that didn't solve the main problem with this story: there's just way too much to read here, even without clicking through to the article. I'm going to go take a nap now.
Hey, I like the way you think!
I was at a Silicon Graphics Inc. convention a few years ago which featured a bunch of neat exhibits by third party companies. There were many cool next-generaiton displays including several of the 3D displays that are just now making it into the marketplace. One even had a pair of little eye-tracking cameras to farther perfect the depth perspective. The result was amazing!
I think when it comes to displays/monitors, "we ain't seen nothing yet". I just hope I can afford some of the new offerings, even a common 23" LCD in boring 2D tech is out of my budget range!
It's only 3 times brighter.
or those who prefer to to give ceo's head in exchange for keeping a job that they don't do shit, good job fag whore!
A few of us from Frantic Films Software wrote up summary of SIGGRAPH 2004 for CgChannel this past Thursday. It touches on many of the same topics in a slightly different light -- although not at all on open source in the industry.
I understand that open source is a hard sell for VFX companies. Most specifically while at SIGGRAPH I heard Steve Sullivan from ILM speak (at a discussion panel) about how even though they have had many users of OpenEXR and wide community adoption of the technology they have had very few people from other VFX companies contribute back to its future development. Steve said that ILM pretty much had to write version 2.0 of OpenEXR by themselves. Thus in effect they have had the problem of many people free riding on their large effort.
Thus for us, while we do plan on releasing smaller tools open source (similar to some of my past open source projects: ExoEngine and Exocortex.DSP), ILM's experience with a large costly open source endeavor scares me away from trying this with a larger project -- at least for the time being.
-ben
This would be "suppressing YOUR truth".
30 times brighter! Now you really need sunglasses in order to look a solar eclipse on TV.
no, yuo!
then again, when everything only has to be written once, its a lot harder to find someone to pay you to write anything. this is unfortunate for those of us who have no problem producing free software, but have slightly less enlightened landlords, loan officers, and grocers.
Wow. A render of my new spaceship!
Look, it fires its laser right at the screen....
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Bull honkus. If your competitors need hair, they'll write hair software, no problem.
--8
Yes, very nice. What I see however is several teams of programmers working for several animation shops, and with your win-win situation, most of these programmers will be visiting the unemployment office, of will be working for Bolliwood, because once there's a common pool of code, there's no need for several teams to do the same thing in their own corner.
So, yeah, really great... Apart for the programmers.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I have an ongoing debate with a friend. He says the armies rendered by WETA for the LOTR series weren't true to Tolkien's numbers, that they were exagerated for dramatic effect. I told him he was full of it and couldn't estimate crowds by looking. I referred him to the controversy surrounding the million man march, and how there was no final estimation on the number of people, and indeed, seemingly no research or scientific study of crowd estimation.
Anyway, is there a way to reverse the crowd drawing algorthm to estimate individuals in a crowd?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
The best bet is to get a group of people together and create their own open source version of it.
Pixie,
Aqsis,
jrman,
et al.
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
Bull honkus. If your competitors need hair, they'll write hair software, no problem."
First of all, let me address the "no problem" part of that -- it's not that easy, bub. I've worked in the industry for over a decade and these things can't just be whipped up. It takes years to perfect systems like hair, crowds, water, or fire -- even a basic lighting pipeline and tool can years to get working nicely.
Granted, knowledge trickles from place to place, either by people moving around or by publishing papers (mostly the former). But whipping up a whole new fluid dynamics simulator overnight.. it just doesn't work that way, even when you know what you're doing.
And there is competitive advantage to these systems, no bull. Maybe not for Pixar, since they control their creative product from end to end, but definitely for companies that bid for work. The company that has developed the most streamlined system for doing a particular kind of effect often gets those jobs. When it comes down to bidding, the company with the most efficient existing pipeline will win. Someone who has to develop it from scratch often won't. Why do you think R+H has gotten EVERY talking animal job since "Babe"? It's not just the talent, it's the process, tools and pipeline. Giving away those three in open source is essentially giving away a market. One of your artists, who you've trained on the toolset, could easily start a new company and take away your bread and butter.
And why are you using OpenEXR as the proof? OpenEXR is a file format that ILM wants mainstream developers to support. It's not Yoda's cloth simulator. It's not the water shader from "Perfect Storm". There's nothing to lose by releasing OpenEXR. There's a ton to lose by releasing my other examples.
Finally, let me just say that the Linux transition has not been easy. There is currently no good solution out there to replace SGI's hole. Linux has zero support from mainstream apps like Photoshop, Quicktime, etc. -- and even SGI had those for a time. And to go down the route of Mac is kinda like joining up with another SGI... a niche player.
In principle, I see what you're saying.. but in the end it is a business. If every business gave away everything they built, that would be called communism. That just ain't hollywood's bag, baby.
It's an unmitigated disaster. If I was to release the color correction tools I use at Hammerhead as Open Source software, for instance, there is no small chance that I would be sued by somebody, or more likely several somebodies, for infringements on their color correction patents. This kind of stuff is patented out the wazoo, and (unfortunately) the only thing that keeps the patent monster at bay is the fact that everybody does work secretly. That, and the fact that Hammerhead is so small that it's not worth suing. Note well that studios are sued over almost every successful movie they make by people alleging the most tenuous copyright infrigement. A typical example is here.
Publishing open source software does have a tremendous advantage, though, in that it is a perfect vector for publishing information that could be used as prior art when trying to defend against other patents -- so open-source is a two-edged sword (or maybe a sword that is honed sharp at both ends.)
Perhaps, just perhaps, there is a solution. It might not be impossible to have anonymous open-source, with guaranteed anonymity provided much the same way the Cypherpunks' MixMaster remailer network works. That way, one could contribute to open-source projects, and share the benefits of your work with others, without exposing yourself to patent suits.
I'm not sure how one would do this, and the network of visual effects studios might be too small -- and the coding styles of the few hundred programmers might be too distinctive -- to have this work, but it could be interesting.
Thad Beier
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
..outside-WELL outside- my area of expertise but even I could understand it and it made a lot of good points, both specifically and in general with open source. Good article.
I highly doubt Pixar would just throw away the $10 million they make annually from PRMan..
I think there is room in the market for a lower-cost or open-source drop-in replacement, but it's a chicken-and-egg problem. Studios cannot use a renderer that is not "production-quality" (by which I mean all the tiny little corner cases and rarely-used code paths have been fully debugged). But it takes years for software to mature to that point. (when you get PRMan you aren't paying for the renderer itself as much as you are paying for ~20 years of bug-fixing). I have tried every alternative RenderMan-compatible renderer I could get my hands on, and while some show a lot of promise, I always find a couple of show-stopper problems that make it impossible to switch.
Again I must emphasize that a production renderer is 10% features and 90% "polish." Many of the alternative renderers have more buzzword features than PRMan (e.g. automatic ambient occlusion baking, automatic network texture caching), but turn out to be completely unusable when you hit an untested corner case (e.g. stuff breaks when you turn on depth of field, or you get pathological memory usage with large motion blur, or the shader compiler has bugs, etc).
The question is, can you convince 3D studios to invest tens of millions of dollars in labor over several years in the hope of replacing something that already exists? I think the time horizon and cost of that investment make it a difficult business case.
According to their website, it was released approximately a year and a half ago.
Depending on the complexity of a project, it can take a LONG time before "outside" contributors see something that needs to be changed, AND feel confident enough in their understanding of the code to change it.
Just look at the Netscape source release - I'd say it took 4-5 YEARS before the Mozilla project became mature enough to actually produce something worth anything. (See the nightmare known as Netscape 6 and its Mozilla equivalents... NS6 and its Moz equivalent SUCKED compared to NS4.x, the end result was that I avoided Moz-based browsers for 2-3 years longer than was probably necessary.)
If you release the source to a complete and relatively mature package, you can't expect outside programmers to take it over immediately. It takes a LOT to get up to speed on a new codebase, ESPECIALLY one you didn't design. That's not to say that it will never happen, but it WILL take time.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Studios are not going to just open source and give out all their code. Even if they did, they'd be huge and confusing to the open source world and nobody would know how to use it. We'd have another Netscape/Gecko/Mozilla thing.
If you want to have open source 3d tools (which there are already), you've got to work from the other end. Creating your own. Taking on the studios at their own game. Growing up between their toes.
If you're a graphics nerd, don't sit around pining like this, start using/hacking on blender and yafray. They are already seriously good and getting better by the day. If they don't meet your requirements yet, start using them and they soon will with all the extra attention. Besides, half the "really cool" stuff done/needed by 'professional' 3d artists are implemented in custom scripted things. Blender's fully python scriptable. Has been for a long time.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
The are many ways to make (save) cash out of open source ( see http://www.opensource.org/advocacy/case_for_busine ss.php for a big picture). There are many success stories of companies that open sourced their softwares, but there were failures too. The problem is that since the "open source" concept is relatively new to company executives, they dont really know how to get the company involved with a community and how to leverage the work comming from the community. I just finished my B.B.A in IT and wrote a paper on open source business models (sry, french is my 1st language). Now I just signed for an other year (lol) and I plan to be doing my master degree on key success indicators of companies open source ventures or something like that. This time I'll have a copy written in english and hope it'll help open source getting more acceptance from company executives.
but one of the things about open source is that you don't just share with your existing big competitors, you also lower the barrier of entry for dozens of smaller ones. That is a good thing in the general scheme of things of course, but the original company may not see it quite that way.
"These studios aren't in the business of writing software, they're in the business of making movies. So why are they spending their time and money writing software? Because they have to; it's a Necessary Evil."
The same could be said for sets, and models, and matte paintings, etc.
does this not count anymore? the gallery on their website is filled with feature films that use them, many of which I didn't realize had CG in it at all. I know that many of the software packages mentioned on other platforms are awesome, but aren't many for cartoon 3d animations? I'm not a 3d guru by any means and would like to hear what you all think about 3d studio max.
as a side note, I work in a tv studio in a high school and need to work 3d into the curriculum. I know a school that some students will go onto (Fullsail, in Florida) uses 3d studio max, which is why I was considering and thinking about it in the first place...
Fox:
In spite of this scramble to assert ownership of the Beaver copyright, defendants are not contending that they based their Scrat on the Beaver.
Yep, I wanna get involved in IP law...
Makes sense. Presumably the 'competitive advantages' that the in-house programmers come up with are only competitive advantages for the studios for a very limited time, one or two films maybe. The GPL would let them hold their special code in-house, unreleased, until the rest of the field catches up, after which they could release it without regrets to avoid forking. Sounds almost too sensible.
Aww, what a cute straw men
If every business gave away everything they built is not what the author argued. Is the athor arguing all the products should be open-sourced? Nope. "Everything" includes non-software products as well. Non-software such as movies. The author didn't even argued all software in this industry should be open-sourced; the author argues for collaboration. Movies aren't going to be given away under some open-source license, i agree, but nowhere did the author argued that, babe.
"lucille
lucille is an open source parallel global illumination renderer with RenderMan interface support."
Say what?
While it's a nice idea, it doesn't work that way: if someone has hair rendering NOW, then they have an advantage for the months that they've had it and the others don't... and if they have it now, they can keep refining it and making it better while the other guys are just finishing their first versions.
Even if you said that they should release it when someone else creates their own (since they lose the competitive advantage), it's still in their best interests to keep until most of the big production houses have it.
Eventually Open Source it... sure, why not? But not as long as you do have the competitive advantage.... or pull an AOL/Netscape... once you know you've lost the competitive advantage, release it as O.S. and hope the hackers make it better than your competitors.
But to tell someone that has an in house product that no one else has that they really don't have a competitive advantage because the other guys will just make it anyway is just baloney... I work in a production studio, 3 months advantage is 3 months advantage... especially when you've got something out there showing it off and people are saying "I want that." How many years did people go to ILM for morphing? By the time everyone was using it, nobody wanted it anymore anyway.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
"Flawed logic.There is sooooo much software yet to be written, so many fields where IT hasn't penetrated or where it can be further used. There is no need whatsoever of clutching to rewriting the same old round wheel over and over again. If all common ground were covered today, there would still be jobs for every software developer alive."
All in India.
And most of it is all the same stuff. Dozens of topics -- and every studio pretty much has pretty similar, rather redundant code to do 'em all.
Not exactly. If you listened to a lot of these talks, they said that they based there system on X paper. They all added their own elements to get what they wanted. They are NOT the same algorithms, it is NOT the same code. The LOTR guys said something like "Well, we call it this because that's what it started as, but it's not really that." The systems differ depending on artistic qualities desired, infrastructure, workflow differences, resolution required, speed... This stuff isn't redundant code. These differences are a great competitive advantage.
Why should you get the studio that did the effects for the Matrix or Day After Tomorrow when everyone has the same abilities? It would be really stupid for them to give up this advantage. Yes, great for random Joe that wants to make great looking graphics, but stupid for people that do this for a living and rely on these advantages to feed their families. And don't expect university researchers to write this stuff for you, because their code generally isn't commercially usable.
OpenEXR is *the* format for high-dynamic-range images
The entire point of one of the later talks on HDR was that there isn't an agreed upon, good format for HDR images. So, no, it's isn't *the* format for HDR images. It is *a* format.
Well, it could begin with open source projects becoming valuable to studios, as started happening with Gimp
People in the graphics community still complain that gimp doesn't measure up. I don't know why open source zealots seem to think everyone loves it.
Just goes to show, that most universities are behind the times when compared to most industries.
So the situation is patents fill up the graphics software landscape. The following tiers of software are kept as business secrets.
As I note from the HP patent cross licensing email a month ago, the big players cross license their software patents.
Looking at the patent problem some more: The problem is in the relatively uncontrolled enforcement and royalty collection practices.
What do we have in the way of institutions and social practices that model patent licensing?
Well I can think of Wartime. The government ignores patents.
And video tape copying, where a copying is allowed.
And there is Fair use. I don't know that there is any fair use of a patent.
That is what the author argued. We aren't talking about movie studios here, we are talking about special effects houses. And the thing that sets the FX houses apart is their homegrown software. If they give this software away then anybody else can use it to bid on FX jobs for movies and the original developer loses a competitive advantage. This is what the parent poster was arguing. Try reading the post, dumass.
" If every business gave away everything they built, that would be called communism. That just ain't hollywood's bag, baby.'
Didn't you pay attention in the 50/60s? Hollywood is Communist!
SIGFAULT
> it's not that easy, bub. I've worked in the industry for over a decade and
;-)
> these things can't just be whipped up. It takes years to perfect systems like
> hair, crowds, water, or fire -- even a basic lighting pipeline and tool can years to get
> working nicely.
I don't mean to say that this stuff is easy -- it's not. If it was easy, sharing it wouldn't be such a big deal. But let me suggest that your arguments impact cost and more than revenue: if you've bid (and won) a contract that requires and effect, you're going to implement the software to do it. I see little to suggest that the opposite ever happens ("our hair pipeline isn't as smooth as ILMs, so maybe we better not bid on that project that'll require hair effects"). Hence, once you win, you have to implement the software -- and once you win the contact, competitive advantages cease to be a factor (until the next contract, at which point the game resets).
> Why do you think R+H has gotten EVERY talking animal job since "Babe"?
I'd suggest that this has more to with reputation and schmoozing between non-tech folks than anything directly related to existing code.
> One of your artists, who you've trained on the toolset, could easily start a new company
> and take away your bread and butter.
Of course, the other side of the coin is that it'll be similarly easier to find an artist who doesn't <b>need</b> training on your custom tools, since they've already used 'em. And in this industry, the ability to ramp up quickly is, I'd suggest, actually more important than retaining existing employees.
> Finally, let me just say that the Linux transition has not been easy.
And yet, the industry has done it. It <b>wasn't</b> easy, but Linux -- because of the power of open source -- was worth the pain of switching. I think that actually supports my point pretty nicely
> If every business gave away everything they built, that would be called communism.
> That just ain't hollywood's bag, baby.
But that's not what Hollywood builds: Hollywood builds movies. Custom software is a necessary evil. If open source reduces that evil and lets them produce slightly more lucrative movies, that's profit. <b>That's</b> Hollywood's bag.
-spc
The article seems a little off in what it says. First of all, I would imagine the ability to create new techniques quckly and with the best results is one of the main selling points for CG companies. For instance, with Perfect Storm, ILM had to write the water effects program from stratch. A lot of research and development had to go into this program. I don't think this is something that ILM really wants to give away for free and it certainly wasn't something that was simple to create. Also, I think that not everything should be given to open source. Don't get me wrong, open source is great for applications that are widely spread (operating systems, browsers) but if you make all of your income off of innovative graphics for movies do you really want to give away your innovative graphic software? Also, this type of software is not the stuff that will benefit a large amount of computer users. It just isn't something that would be a huge benefit to the community as a whole.
SIGFAULT
No that would NOT be communism. Communism is a scheme which abolishes inequalities in the possession of property, as by distributing all wealth equally to all, or by holding all wealth in common for the equal use and advantage of all.
Free software does NOT change the possession of property. It establishes a license which allows participation and distribution - an altruistic action - but the business or individual who wrote the code still owns the code insofar as copyright permits. It's the complete opposite of communism.
Free software is altruistic capitalism. NOT COMMUNISM.
Yes, what you have just described is true -- and it has nothing to do with what I wrote. I was just pointing out that you can't just whip this stuff up in a day, something that was implied by the way you worded your original post.
> Why do you think R+H has gotten EVERY > talking animal job since "Babe"?
I'd suggest that this has more to with reputation and schmoozing between non-tech folks than anything directly related to existing code.
That might not have been the perfect example, since it's been 10 years since the talking pig was pioneered by them, but I think the point is generally valid. They still have to hit the right price point for the quality they provide against the rest of the market. Clearly they have a technical advantage over anyone else doing that kind of effect.
> One of your artists, who you've trained on the toolset, could easily start a new company > and take away your bread and butter.
Of course, the other side of the coin is that it'll be similarly easier to find an artist who doesn't need training on your custom tools, since they've already used 'em. And in this industry, the ability to ramp up quickly is, I'd suggest, actually more important than retaining existing employees.
Sure, that is a boon. But that still doesn't affect having to develop new code for a new effect. If you have to do that, OSS or not, an artist will have to learn a new tool.
Besides, there is a mechanism for that, it's called third party software. Let someone else develop, train and distribute software to the masses.
In fact, you could do this today... just distribute the result for free when you're done.
> Finally, let me just say that the Linux transition has not been easy. ;-)
And yet, the industry has done it. It wasn't easy, but Linux -- because of the power of open source -- was worth the pain of switching. I think that actually supports my point pretty nicely
That doesn't support your point in any way. These two things are in no way related:
- Companies taking a free OS and use it to save money on the farm costs (as opposed to dishing out for Windows licenses).
- Companies distributing proprietary production tools, designed to achive customized effects, to the world as open source.
Unless you think giving and taking are the same thing, I don't see the similarity. And trust me, the typical jeans and jacket Hollywood executive mostly thinks about taking. So anything to help an fx company lower the bottom line-(1)-will help them in the end.(1) - or at least has that perception -- I don't think linux in the farm is a bad idea. But I argue that more has been spent on trying to get linux to work on the desktop than would have ever been spent on Windows licenses over the past 3 or 4 years. And still, today, Windows continues to provide more complete desktop solution for 3D and graphic artists
But that's not what Hollywood builds: Hollywood builds movies. Custom software is a necessary evil. If open source reduces that evil and lets them produce slightly more lucrative movies, that's profit. That's Hollywood's bag.
Go into Hollywood and ask a producer for some leads on a great unknown writer. Ask a location scout for a hand-out of jungle locations he might have on hand. Ask a DP for his camera or favorite filter, or a Libra operator for free instructions on how to run that mechanism.
Software is just another application of someone's knowledge, and there's tons of proprietary knowledge when it comes to making movies (or just about anything interesting).
I didn't read any comments for this story, and I'm posting late. So I don't know if anyone else pointed this out. But there is one very large downfall of making all this high-end computer graphics software open-source. The general public will have access to it. What does this mean? It means that slashdot geeks are going to start making Pixar quality movies in their basements.
Sure, they don't have the cpu power to render entire movies. That is obvious. But they can do low quality quick-renders on scene at a time while they make the film. When their work is complete they will easily find a render farm to turn it into a finished product. If their work is quality of course. If they make a piece of junk nobody is going to give them the time of day.
So Pixar isn't worried about giving Dreamworks new hair software. They're worried about giving you and me hair software. Right now we have to pay companies like Alias thousands of dollars. Or suffer blender and its icky interface. It's not about helping the competition. It's about not creating new competition. And its about not giving away something for free that cost them a lot of money.
If the code is all open sourced, the film companies will fire all their coders. They will wait on the open source project to do it for them. But then, since nobody is coding on it they have to hire coders. Since they have to hire coders still, there isn't really a benefit. They aren't saving money if they keep all those coders on salary.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
OpenSceneGraph (http://www.openscenegraph.org) had a pretty good showing at SIGGraph. I attended the BOF (Birds of a Feather) meeting, and presented what my company has done with it.
OSG as it is known is a modified LGPL -- modified to allow code to be included in commercial projects via C++ inline functions, which technically would violate the pure-LGPL stipulation of dynamic-linking only.
OSG is an excellent example of the marriage of commercial/proprietary software and Open Source. Tons of people use OSG to build Open Source and commercial apps. No one minds if my company, or anyone else builds commercial, closed-source apps with OSG, because it's the meat of OSG that is valuable to the community. There may be useful parts in other people's applications, but it's the improvements of the core code that drives the project. If enough closed-source people need the same capability, befor elong, it will ge developed and put into the code OSG project for all to benefit from.
It's a profitable deal for everyone involved, and I think it's a great example of how Open Source and proprietary projects aren't necessarily at odds with each other, and can mutually benefit from their relationship.
-- There is no truth. There is only Perception. To Percieve is to Exist.
Shut up, you pinko commie bastard.
At SIGGRAPH I attended a Birds of a Feather meeting organized by Pixar. They called all the mayor studios, software/hardware vendors and Linux distribution developers to talk about how to standarize their Linux systems.
Since the demise of SGI and the later migration of the industry to Linux they opened the Linux/Pandora box and want to use a proven and reliable Linux distribution. One of the options is to use a couple of distributions as a guide (Fedora Core 2 & Suse), if any of their programs works with any of these distributions, then a software vendor must make the program work on the other distributions.
I'm sure someone from the companies involved can talk more about this.
Titus Maledetto
Well, I think you should switch to another brand of Graphic Professor Unit...
with this new high dynamic range display, I hear that the color scheme for the IT articles is actually readable
..and then I made my final mistake by entering Slashdot games http://games.slashdot.org/. Now I only enjoy the 10x darkness for the rest of my life as a blind person.
Little do you know.
Actually when you accidentally enter IT-themed Slashdot article, the 30x brighter colors of this new display will burn your retina, causing physical pain and involuntary muscle convulsions.
Then we get into the issue of patents. A lot of code these companies produce includes patented algorithms which would disqualify the code from even being released under a lot of Open Source licenses to begin with
... there is no reason people couldn't telecommute to wherever the software is legal. Let the US patent system strangle the US economy, while the rest of the world enjoys its intellectual freedom and the prosperity that follows.
That is a problem trivial to deal with. Relocate your special effects shop to Canada, Europe, or -- should those two be Finlandized by the United State's expansion of patent law to include mathematics, software, and business models and cave completely -- South America or the far east.
Software and data are easy to move around
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Look, I know it's cool to bash Microsoft and call them "M$" and whatnot
It'd be much easier to give Microsoft credit for things if they hadn't pulled so many questionable and boneheaded PR moves in the past, like that fake "switch" ad from a couple years back that turned out to be written by a PR person and used a stock photo. They then went back and forth for 3 days on whether the story was real or not. And the pre-written anti-anti-trust letters to the editor they circulated. And so on....
I realize that some of these things are the decisions of PR firms and not Microsoft's management. Regardless, I find myself wondering what is real and what is PR. Including Slashdot posts - I'm not accusing you in particular, but given past behavior it would be no surprise if they hired some PR firm that thought posting pro-MS items on Slashdot might be a good way to spend their billions.
Maybe it's time to get fitted for a tinfoil hat....
JT
______ This mind intentionally left blank.
Yeah, and there is no duplication of effort in open source
It was obvious that the author meant that Pixar's lawyers killed ExLuna. That was the point. That was the only point, right there...that a lawyer's point of view rather than a technologists point of view led Pixar to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
In terms of "whether that was more or less effort", comparing the open sourcing to the uptake of the format...it was because of the open sourcing that the format became ubiquitous.
Sorry, all, if I've been trolled...
The latter paragraph is the most likely reason why we aren't seeing more stuff getting open-sourced.
(Well, that and software that's built on licensed crap from third parties, where the license forbids release of the slightest details, including API...)
We still have a long way to go before we have anything close to "real" reusability. Functional languages like Common LISP and Haskell are looking pretty good right now...
Free software does NOT change the possession of property
Geez, calm down. Then stop arguing out of Webster's instead of looking at the big picture. If every VFX company gave away every competitive advantage they ever created to the public, that would essentially be the same as public ownership, no matter who owns the copyright.
Plus, there is no such thing as "altruistic capitalism". That is an oxymoron. Look around you and realize that most companies participate in open source only when it helps their bottom line or image. No one gives away true, advantageous IP to open source in VFX or any industry.
Piece by piece is the answer. Perhaps OpenEXR hasn't been a raging success for ILM, but it provides one tiny piece. Slowly but surely others will release pieces, however tiny. Others will release early and often on new pieces they start to write, and sometimes they will hit on others work who are working on similar things and who want to go in the same direction. Some pieces will become the standard/most popular but soon enough everything will be covered, then while R+H might still be getting talking animals, everyone else will be chipping away together on a Free alternative which R+H will have to pay to stay ahead of, or eventually see the rest able to compete equally with them, without one studio having to fund the catch-up to R+H alone.
There will always be the cutting edge proprietary in-house work of studios, that doesn't mean that 95% of software used in studios can't be collaboratively developed and it doesn't mean that a studio cannot run entirely on Free software choosing to seek it's competitive advantages elsewhere!
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
> There will always be the cutting edge
> proprietary in-house work of studios, that
> doesn't mean that 95% of software used in
> studios can't be collaboratively developed
And that exists -- it's called MAYA.
Out here, in the real world, we have the Diamond Match company to prove you wrong.
On January 28, 1911, about a year after perfecting the non-poisonous safety match, the Diamond Match company released their patent for the good of mankind.
Roughly simultaneously, the US Congress placed a high tax on toxic "lucifer" and explosive "congreve" matches that were a public health and safety hazard (see "match-head disease", "phossy jaw", and "lucifer matches" for more information.
Altruism occurs among capitalists, communists, even libertarians (though not among the Ayn Rand worshippers, of course). Perhaps it is a mark of advanced species that individual altruism is a viable strategy.