It stands for Geffen, like David Geffen of Geffen records.
Re:x86 not a substitute for MIPS
on
Linux and Shrek
·
· Score: 1
Well just check my previous post about PDI's rendering statistics. But while it is true that these companies are not dumping their SGI's in huge numbers they are indeed putting up x86 based machines up. And besides, remember that SGI sells x86 based machines. Here is a quote from the rendering statistics:
Re:Don't extrapolate from PDI/Dreamworks
on
Linux and Shrek
·
· Score: 1
Well That is not the case anymore. SPI indeed started using mostly off the shelf stuff, like 3D Studio, like when they did The Craft. But nowadays they have their own R&D staffs and lots of custom hardware. Back in 1995 in a RenderMan course (if I remember correctly), the people from ILM stated back then that they were close to running 50%-50% propietary vs. off the shelf software. After all back when ILM started their CG dept (1979) there was really no off the shelf software, not even workstation as we know them today (SGI and SUN came in the early 80s). Same with most of the CG Animation companies, PDI celebrated its 20th anniversary, and Pixar also creates their own software, as well as Blue Sky and Rhythm and Hues.
If you want to see how much propietary stuff this studios create just check this CGW article about some of the toos created and used in Episode 1:
I fail to see how this is an indication of selling out. A/W is pretty independent. The decision to port to Linux was driven by A/W's client demands as Mark Sylvester, A/W World Ambassador, has stated publicly several times.
Here is a quote from Tippett Studios back from a SIGGRAPH 99 press release, when the Maya and Composer batch renderers were introduced:
"Alias|Wavefront is not content to rest upon its laurels," said Brennen Doyle, compositing supervisor for Tippett Studios. "Linux support is an indication of their commitment to give production artists the ability to work with the best tools on whatever operating system suits their needs. The Linux Maya Composer Renderer will enable us to build an inexpensive and fast render farm, making our compositors even more efficient and increasing Composer software's cash input to image output ratio."
"Linux is emerging as a viable alternative platform for rendering, and our customers have been asking for this," says Peter Goldie, general manager of the entertainment business unit at Alias|Wavefront. "Porting our Maya Composer Renderer and Maya Batch Render to Linux will give our customers increased flexibility, and reinforce our commitment to adapt Maya® technology to fit the ever-changing needs of the production community.
IF ILM came to A/W and wanted Maya ported to Linux and would convert a lot of licenses to it, you bet A/W would (and indeed) listened to their customer demands.
And besides SGI still has an extended roadmap for their highend MIPS and Irix stuff. I doubt Linux would scale to a 256 CPU Origin 2000 machine (at least not in the near future).
Re:punniest dept. name, and disappointing resoluti
on
Linux and Shrek
·
· Score: 1
Yeah but you get to the point where any increase in resolution wont matter. At least stuff from CG animated movies get mostly done on computers so there is less degradation of quality as opposed to live action films. For comparison here is a post by Tom Duff at Pixar from the RenderMan newsgroup:
Paul Thomas Raugust wrote:
>
> Purely for the sake of satiating my relentless curiosity, I was
> wondering what kind of render resolution is being used today for fully
> cg animation?... As I recall, Toy Story was rendered out at
> approximately 1500 x n (whatever comes out to 1.78:1), which is notably
> less than the more standardized 2k or 4k film resolutions.
There's a lot of good information in the other posts on this thread.
Since the price of your renderfarm depends critically on the resolution
of the images you generate, it's worth doing a fair bit of investigation
to find the right numbers. Generally what we do is scan out resolution
test patterns, run them through the full release-print generation process
and evaluate them projected in a theatre. Release prints are commonly
made in a four step process:
1) scan onto color negative stock
2) make an interpositive
3) make a printing negative
4) print on release print stock in a high-speed printer
The resolution limit for this process is way below what the
original negative stock can record. Generally, we see about
1200-1500 lines across the screen, which is where the Toy Story
numbers come from.
Monsters, Inc. is being done at slightly higher resolution (less than
twice as many pixels), but I think the exact numbers are still a secret.
I don't know why we decided to bump the resolution. Possibly we see better
release prints these days, or possibly they just want a little margin
and think they can afford it.
Someone asked about screen and pixel aspect ratio. We generally compute
square pixels at exactly the intended display resolution, and count on
the film recorder to squeeze them if we're making an anamorphic negative.
(A Bugs Life was a 2.35 production, computed at 2048x871) Monsters is
being done at 1.85.
I should point out that Prman is perfectly happy computing non-square pixels.
Yes they are, though they operate like an independent business unit. SGI acquired both Alias and wavefront shortly after Microsoft bought Softimage.
Re:What does Bill think about it?
on
Linux and Shrek
·
· Score: 1
No thats for David Geffen, music industry heavyweight.
Re:The Software they're using..
on
Linux and Shrek
·
· Score: 2
Actually M$ sold Softimage to Avid quite a few years ago, in 1998. At last year's Softimage User Group Meeting at SIGGRAPH 2000, they showed at the end a beta port of Softimage running under RedHat 6.2.
Well not quite a surprise considering recent happenings in the last few SIGGRAPHs. Of course there is that recent article in Millimeter magazine, and for specific you can check the rendering statistics from Daniel Wexler, PDI's renderer architect:
Yep they used ton of of MEL (Maya Embedded Language) scripts to do a great many deal of things. But it's not like some were a few hundred lines long, but some were several thousands line and in essence became mini apps or plugins for Maya accesible from within Maya and have their mini-GUIs. Some good examples of their MEL scripts use was the CG people walking around the stadium, and the Pods behaviour. And you can get better endorsment than in the Learning Python book from O'Reilly that has a little quote from an ILM TD.
But a ton of other stuff was indeed custom stuff, like their choreography app, cloth simulations, terrain generation, etc.. There are some nifty details here:
Most major FX companies use some form of scripting or the other. After all since most generate RIBs to render on Photorealistic RenderMan, since they are just huge text files in essence you can massage them with something like Perl before being sent to the renderer. At last years SIGGRAPH course on Dinosaur, they showed this clips of their Maya extensions to do the facial animation, and on the Stuart Little one how hair was handled from Maya.
If you just look at the FX houses recruting pages, you can see that there has been for quite some time demand for scripting langages, from csh to Perl, Tcl/tk and Python.
Many apps are already ported or in the works. Houdini was ported over a year ago (maybe close to 2 years). Photorealistic RenderMan from Pixar is available for Linux. The compositing package Shake (from Nothing Real, and being used in Lord of the Rings) is available right now. Rastrack and roto from Hammerahead are available for Linux (used in X-Men among other movies), Jig from Steamboat Software started on Linux.
As far as apps in the porting process, Maya is being ported to Linux (should be ready for SIGGRAPH) and the batch renderer is already available, Softimage XSI is being ported (a beta was shown running under RedHat 6.2, last SIGGRAPH users meeting).
Also several studios have worked on porting there on stuff to Linux or enhancing Linux apps. Most notably, the work that Rhythm and Hues have done on the Gimp, and studios like PDI porting there stuff to Linux, and Hammerahead among others:
Well, if you check out any mirrors that include Rawhide, you can see that not only is kernel 2.4.0 is in there (along with 2.2.16), but also Gnome 1.2, KDE 2.0, XFree 4.0.2. They still have the 2.96 gcc though if that's anyone concern.
Ahhhh, but the cloth simulations are not realtime. As far as that is concerned we have already seen CG cloth done before. As someone mentioned there is Geri's Game, and even The Phantom Menace, though it used part simulation, part hand animating. There have been also commercials like a Coca Cola spot by Digital Domain.
Even before that there have been some amazing demos shown at SIGGRAPH. There is the work of Nadia Thalmann at Miralab
and a cloth simulation paper was the cover of the SIGGRAPH 98 Proceedings. It was by David Baraff and Andrew Witkin, both I think are now at Pixar.
It will still take some time to get realtime cloth simulations, especially for simulating different types of cloths, with good collision detection (self and otherwise) and that it doesn't involve a square pice of cloth like a flag, but something more complex like garnments which are made from shaped pieces. Looking forward to it, but not holding my breath.
They used to be plugins , but now Maya Cloth is part of the Maya Unlimited package:
Maya Cloth
Softimage has cloth simulations available as a plugin. Here is one I found:
Fabrix for Softimage
It's only twice as fast for rendering which is mainly a function of processor speed, system bandwidth and memory (and to a lesser extent network bandwidth). Intel and AMD processors are way faster than MIPS processors, but SGI has high througput systems, and also the best OpenGL implementation. They probably use the machines for interactive work during the day (and I don't doubt the new Octanes are better than any), but during the night they join the rendering farm, where they could really shine. Your claim about the software is incorrect, Photorealistc RenderMan runs mainly on Unix based OSes (Solaris, IRIX and Linux) and Windows NT. So they for sure have measured how "good" PRMan runs under de 1200 and standard Octanes, and the CPU performance would make a differnce.
Well Linux doesn't have anything to do with getting effects, cheaper probably, but it's up to the artists and technicians involved. Actually a lot of companies are looking and using Linux at the moment, like Digital Domain (renderin g on Titanic for example), Rhythm and Hues (their work on getting 16 bit Gimp and application porting) and Hammerhead (they even have Linux software to give away). This last SIGGRAPH you copuld here a lot of people from the industry talking about it.
Someone at the RenderMan newsgroup asked about it and several Pixar folks ansewered. RIB files (the scenes descriptions sent to a RenderMan renderer) would get in the GB range excluding textures. Here are some quotes (if I may) from Tom Duf and "Wave" Johnson:
Tom Duff wrote:
>
> Daniel McFarland wrote:
>
> > What size (mb ) is considered a large scene file.
>
> Around here, 2000 MB is large, 500 MB is small.
> Not counting texture maps, which normally
> add up to larger than RIB files.
note that 2GB would probably be the size after a catrib -ascii, i.e.
the gzipped binary RIB file would probably be smaller. Having said
that, I've routinely seen files in the 1GB+ range (after ASCIIfication)
that were only a portion of the scene (i.e. they were to be composited
over some other elements).
Most RIB files of a scene would occupy only a few hundred megabytes on
disk, assuming (as most are) that they are compressed binary RIB files.
Also note that these days, many of your RIB files have Procedurals
in them that are trivially compact in the RIB file, but expand out
into a fair amount of data when the renderer actually evaluates them.
2 steps forward, one step back:-)
--
--> Michael B. Johnson, Ph.D. -- wave@pixar.com
--> Studio Tools, Pixar Animation Studios
--> http://xenia.media.mit.edu/~wave
Maybe he'll take about it at SIGGRAPH. He si actually giving a talk down there about free software and graphics. Here is the link: How Free is Free Software makes me wonder why Slashdot has not posted anything about SIGGRAPH (Darryl Strauss of DRI, Titanic, and Linux Glide fame will also give a talk).
I guess it depends on viewpoint. What's long enough? Maybe they haven't been as long as Disney, but they've been around since 1979 when the ILM Computer Graphics group was formed. It was sold to Steve Jobs in 1986. So they've been around for some time. Now they are an animation studio and have a software business on the side. But they have experimeted and created a lot of stuff, like the Pixar Image computer, (and if I remeber correctly the EditDroid which was retained by Lucas and then sold to Avid, but don't quote me on that).
Well, but they are different styles of animated movies. Pixar has gone with a cartoony style for it's characters and movies (though some of the details go for a more realistic look), it's got certain style. Square has gone a little more realistic with their movie, or hyper(or almost) realistic movie. It's just different styles.
Well, it was actually PDI (through their association with Dreamworks) that did Antz. They have at least 2 pictures coming down the pipe: "Shrek" and "Tusker". Also Dreamworks has a multi-picture deal with Aardman (Chiecken Run), and they have at least 2 movies coming up, a version of the tortoise and the hare, and a Wallace and Gromit Movie. Fox has their association with Blue Sky Studios (they did 3D portion on Titan AE, originally it was going to be all 3D), and it wouldn't surprise me that they also got into it. Even ILM recently announced that they are trying to get into the 3D animated film business, and Digital Domain has always looked to expand and create content. As long as this houses develop and nurture their projects (instead of being mandated by the big studio), there should be healthy competition.
Slashdot Mirror
It stands for Geffen, like David Geffen of Geffen records.
Well just check my previous post about PDI's rendering statistics. But while it is true that these companies are not dumping their SGI's in huge numbers they are indeed putting up x86 based machines up. And besides, remember that SGI sells x86 based machines. Here is a quote from the rendering statistics:
ProductCPUs
OS
Description
SGI Origin200
406
IRIX 6.5
Dual R10000 180MHz, 512MB SGI RAM, 3U + 1 rackmount, 9GB HDD
V/A Research
292
Linux
Dual PIII 450MHz, 1GB PC-100 SDRAM, 2U rackmount, 39GB HDD
SGI 1200
324
Linux
Dual PIII 800MHz, 2GB PC-133 SDRAM, 2U rackmount, 39GB HDD
Atipa
270
Linux
Dual PIII 800MHz, 2GB PC-133 SDRAM, 1U rackmount 39GB HDD
SGI O2
190
IRIX 6.5
Single processor O2s, R10000 , 256-512MB SGI RAM, 9GB HDD
Total
1482 cpus
836 boxes,
443 dual processor Linux boxes, 203 dual O200s, and 190 O2s.
Here is my previous post:
Rendering StatisticsWell That is not the case anymore. SPI indeed started using mostly off the shelf stuff, like 3D Studio, like when they did The Craft. But nowadays they have their own R&D staffs and lots of custom hardware. Back in 1995 in a RenderMan course (if I remember correctly), the people from ILM stated back then that they were close to running 50%-50% propietary vs. off the shelf software. After all back when ILM started their CG dept (1979) there was really no off the shelf software, not even workstation as we know them today (SGI and SUN came in the early 80s). Same with most of the CG Animation companies, PDI celebrated its 20th anniversary, and Pixar also creates their own software, as well as Blue Sky and Rhythm and Hues.
If you want to see how much propietary stuff this studios create just check this CGW article about some of the toos created and used in Episode 1:
Episode 1 ILM toolsI fail to see how this is an indication of selling out. A/W is pretty independent. The decision to port to Linux was driven by A/W's client demands as Mark Sylvester, A/W World Ambassador, has stated publicly several times.
Here is a quote from Tippett Studios back from a SIGGRAPH 99 press release, when the Maya and Composer batch renderers were introduced:
IF ILM came to A/W and wanted Maya ported to Linux and would convert a lot of licenses to it, you bet A/W would (and indeed) listened to their customer demands. And besides SGI still has an extended roadmap for their highend MIPS and Irix stuff. I doubt Linux would scale to a 256 CPU Origin 2000 machine (at least not in the near future).Yeah but you get to the point where any increase in resolution wont matter. At least stuff from CG animated movies get mostly done on computers so there is less degradation of quality as opposed to live action films. For comparison here is a post by Tom Duff at Pixar from the RenderMan newsgroup:
Yes they are, though they operate like an independent business unit. SGI acquired both Alias and wavefront shortly after Microsoft bought Softimage.
No thats for David Geffen, music industry heavyweight.
Actually M$ sold Softimage to Avid quite a few years ago, in 1998. At last year's Softimage User Group Meeting at SIGGRAPH 2000, they showed at the end a beta port of Softimage running under RedHat 6.2.
Just check their website:
Softimage Corporate infoAvid Corporate History
Well not quite a surprise considering recent happenings in the last few SIGGRAPHs. Of course there is that recent article in Millimeter magazine, and for specific you can check the rendering statistics from Daniel Wexler, PDI's renderer architect:
Linux and the FX industryPDI's Rendering Statistics
Just to round it out, the interview translation:
Yep they used ton of of MEL (Maya Embedded Language) scripts to do a great many deal of things. But it's not like some were a few hundred lines long, but some were several thousands line and in essence became mini apps or plugins for Maya accesible from within Maya and have their mini-GUIs. Some good examples of their MEL scripts use was the CG people walking around the stadium, and the Pods behaviour. And you can get better endorsment than in the Learning Python book from O'Reilly that has a little quote from an ILM TD.
But a ton of other stuff was indeed custom stuff, like their choreography app, cloth simulations, terrain generation, etc.. There are some nifty details here:
ILM tools for Episode 1 at CGW (free reg. required)Most major FX companies use some form of scripting or the other. After all since most generate RIBs to render on Photorealistic RenderMan, since they are just huge text files in essence you can massage them with something like Perl before being sent to the renderer. At last years SIGGRAPH course on Dinosaur, they showed this clips of their Maya extensions to do the facial animation, and on the Stuart Little one how hair was handled from Maya.
If you just look at the FX houses recruting pages, you can see that there has been for quite some time demand for scripting langages, from csh to Perl, Tcl/tk and Python.
Pixar's products supported platforms
Nothing real
Jig
As far as apps in the porting process, Maya is being ported to Linux (should be ready for SIGGRAPH) and the batch renderer is already available, Softimage XSI is being ported (a beta was shown running under RedHat 6.2, last SIGGRAPH users meeting).
Also several studios have worked on porting there on stuff to Linux or enhancing Linux apps. Most notably, the work that Rhythm and Hues have done on the Gimp, and studios like PDI porting there stuff to Linux, and Hammerahead among others:
Gimp for film
So it's allready happening.
Well, if you check out any mirrors that include Rawhide, you can see that not only is kernel 2.4.0 is in there (along with 2.2.16), but also Gnome 1.2, KDE 2.0, XFree 4.0.2. They still have the 2.96 gcc though if that's anyone concern.
Even before that there have been some amazing demos shown at SIGGRAPH. There is the work of Nadia Thalmann at Miralab and a cloth simulation paper was the cover of the SIGGRAPH 98 Proceedings. It was by David Baraff and Andrew Witkin, both I think are now at Pixar.
It will still take some time to get realtime cloth simulations, especially for simulating different types of cloths, with good collision detection (self and otherwise) and that it doesn't involve a square pice of cloth like a flag, but something more complex like garnments which are made from shaped pieces. Looking forward to it, but not holding my breath.
They used to be plugins , but now Maya Cloth is part of the Maya Unlimited package: Maya Cloth Softimage has cloth simulations available as a plugin. Here is one I found: Fabrix for Softimage
It's only twice as fast for rendering which is mainly a function of processor speed, system bandwidth and memory (and to a lesser extent network bandwidth). Intel and AMD processors are way faster than MIPS processors, but SGI has high througput systems, and also the best OpenGL implementation. They probably use the machines for interactive work during the day (and I don't doubt the new Octanes are better than any), but during the night they join the rendering farm, where they could really shine. Your claim about the software is incorrect, Photorealistc RenderMan runs mainly on Unix based OSes (Solaris, IRIX and Linux) and Windows NT. So they for sure have measured how "good" PRMan runs under de 1200 and standard Octanes, and the CPU performance would make a differnce.
For those interested, there was a BOF meeting at SIGGRAPH 2000 dealing with Linux and 3D. The notes by Brian Paul are already available: SIGGRAPH 2000 Linux / OpenGL / 3D Birds of a Feather Meeting
Well Linux doesn't have anything to do with getting effects, cheaper probably, but it's up to the artists and technicians involved. Actually a lot of companies are looking and using Linux at the moment, like Digital Domain (renderin g on Titanic for example), Rhythm and Hues (their work on getting 16 bit Gimp and application porting) and Hammerhead (they even have Linux software to give away). This last SIGGRAPH you copuld here a lot of people from the industry talking about it.
Tom Duff wrote:
:-)
>
> Daniel McFarland wrote:
>
> > What size (mb ) is considered a large scene file.
>
> Around here, 2000 MB is large, 500 MB is small.
> Not counting texture maps, which normally
> add up to larger than RIB files.
note that 2GB would probably be the size after a catrib -ascii, i.e.
the gzipped binary RIB file would probably be
smaller. Having said that, I've routinely seen files in the 1GB+ range (after ASCIIfication)
that were only a portion of the scene (i.e. they were to be composited
over some other elements).
Most RIB files of a scene would occupy only a few
hundred megabytes on disk, assuming (as most are) that they are
compressed binary RIB files.
Also note that these days, many of your RIB files
have Procedurals in them that are trivially compact in the RIB
file, but expand out into a fair amount of data when the renderer
actually evaluates them.
2 steps forward, one step back
--
--> Michael B. Johnson, Ph.D. -- wave@pixar.com
--> Studio Tools, Pixar Animation Studios
--> http://xenia.media.mit.edu/~wave
Maybe he'll take about it at SIGGRAPH. He si actually giving a talk down there about free software and graphics. Here is the link: How Free is Free Software makes me wonder why Slashdot has not posted anything about SIGGRAPH (Darryl Strauss of DRI, Titanic, and Linux Glide fame will also give a talk).
Here is the info from Sun's website about the renderfarm used during Toy story: http://www.sun.com/951201/cover/cover-press.html
Well the renderfarm is SUN, but the workstations are Macs and SGI.
I guess it depends on viewpoint. What's long enough? Maybe they haven't been as long as Disney, but they've been around since 1979 when the ILM Computer Graphics group was formed. It was sold to Steve Jobs in 1986. So they've been around for some time. Now they are an animation studio and have a software business on the side. But they have experimeted and created a lot of stuff, like the Pixar Image computer, (and if I remeber correctly the EditDroid which was retained by Lucas and then sold to Avid, but don't quote me on that).
Well, but they are different styles of animated movies. Pixar has gone with a cartoony style for it's characters and movies (though some of the details go for a more realistic look), it's got certain style. Square has gone a little more realistic with their movie, or hyper(or almost) realistic movie. It's just different styles.
Well, it was actually PDI (through their association with Dreamworks) that did Antz. They have at least 2 pictures coming down the pipe: "Shrek" and "Tusker". Also Dreamworks has a multi-picture deal with Aardman (Chiecken Run), and they have at least 2 movies coming up, a version of the tortoise and the hare, and a Wallace and Gromit Movie. Fox has their association with Blue Sky Studios (they did 3D portion on Titan AE, originally it was going to be all 3D), and it wouldn't surprise me that they also got into it. Even ILM recently announced that they are trying to get into the 3D animated film business, and Digital Domain has always looked to expand and create content. As long as this houses develop and nurture their projects (instead of being mandated by the big studio), there should be healthy competition.