It really hasn't been too much of a problem because 3D programs have many features for rough compositing and fine tuned compositing can easily be done on another computer by just moving the image sequences over to the NT or SGI box and working on the composite shot there. There is shake for linux, but I know almost nothing about it. So its not really a problem because the 3D programs are made for compositing and modularity in a work pipeline in the first place. Premier and After Effects are more towards the middle end of the scale anyway, most high end studios use inferno on NT or SGI to composite, and that's not on Linux either.
So, I guess the answer is that it really isn't a shortcoming, the image standards are there and that's what really counts. Shockwave and Flash are more web stuff and I am not sure if exporter plugins for them are ported to Linux, but it doesn't matter a whole lot anyway, people doing that almost definitly have a NT or Mac box and they can use that to export to Flash and Shockwave, even if they did all the work on a Linux or SGI computer.
I am not sure exactly what you are refuting. I know that PRman is used for almost all CG in films with BMRT and Mental Ray filling in a few gaps here and there. Not all studios are working for film however.
I never said that PRman was new to linux.
Maya, SI, 3DS, LW, and Houdini are the serious 3D programs out there. They are the complete, commercial, 3D packages used for production work 95% of the time. Cinema 4D might be there too someday. Axis, being shown at siggraph was done entirely with 3DS. All of Blizzard's animation is done with 3DS. Those five programs are what people buy when they are in a production environment. I realize that there are many side programs that have special uses.
You are refuting statements that I have not made, so please, get a clue.
Premier and After Effects are not tied to a specific OS. Final Cut Pro and Director will probably never make it to Linux and it doesn't matter. This story is about 3D, not video. Video is a weak point for Linux but 3D is definitly not. There are standard file formats and they are called image sequences.
What I meant is that there are industries that require specialized software and they aren't going to be able to obtain open source versions of it. I realize that there may already be open source 3D apps, but they are nothing compared to the commercial high end, which has had 15 years to mature.
Hey, can you tell me how I can get information on Entropy? I check the website for updates everyday. I can't find out what the new and exciting architecture is because the white papers aren't posted yet. What's the deal?
This is false. Renderman is a specification, and not a program. You are probably referring to Photorealistic Renderman by Pixar. Renderman the specification is made up of a scene description language (ASCII and bytecode) and a shanding language that is written and compiled. Perl had barely been invented when the renderman specification was created. Renderman does not use Perl or Python, and I have never heard of PRman using Perl or Python.
This is almost completely false. Pixar used many Sun computers as their renderfarm, but I doubt Sun donated 1000 computers to them, and I didn't see a credit at the end. As for SGI's not being used in render farms.... http://www2.linuxjournal.com/cgi-bin/frames.pl/ind ex.html There is a picture on that page which proves you very wrong.
This is a pretty big issue so I feel I should run down some of the more important points.
First, yes, SGI offered Linux systems a long time ago and to my knowledge they have done very poorly. They were however for workstations and not rendering, as IBM's newest offerings seem to be. IBM is probably going into workstations too, but that isn't what the article is about. Many big companies with Big Money (TM) have invested a whole ass ton in SGI clusters over the years, from Onyx computers for compositing and play back, to Octanes for creation, to Origin's for processing job queues.
Everyone is switching to Linux. PC's are so cheap and close to what SGI has to offer that it stands out as a clear solution. Pentium 4's and Athalon 4's are including more features suitable to rendering. SIMD instructions are great stuff for all the vector math that goes on behind the scenes. Linux costs nothing so when you have 1000 computers in your render farm you aren't paying $200,000 in licenses every few years. It is stable so that also helps everything, especially rendering. When a frame takes 8 hours to render, you don't want to worry about the OS crashing 6 hours through. You have 1000 computers and if they don't all work smoothly you are fucked. Lastly, Linux is unix, and that's important for an industry coming off of other unix platforms, mainly Irix.
Software for Linux is Good Stuff (TM) in the graphics world. As far as rendering goes, you have the mighty PRman, Mental Ray, Blue Moon Rendering Tools, Jig, Entropy, and many other renderers. That's good enough for just about any studio. On the software front, you have the magic four (or five, depending on how you look at it) of Maya 4 , Softimage XSI 2.0, 3D Studio 4, Lightwave 6.5, and Houdini. Maya and Houdini run on Linux right now and can be purchased for a small (huge) fee. Lightwave is the most ported 3D application that I know of and runs on Amiga (earlier versions), Windows NT, Sun OS, Solaris, Mac OS, Mac OS X, and Irix. It shouldn't be a huge deal to port to Linux. 3D Studio is another story. It has a deep history of being rooted in WinNT, and didn't even run on NT for Alpha when Alphas were all the rage so only time will tell. Also compositing software like Shake is making its way as well.
Last on the list is custom software. Pacific Data Images (Antz, Shrek) has written lots of software for Linux and ported lots from Irix as well. Linux is unix of course and that means that all the custom software that no one wanted to port from Irix to NT is now being ported to Linux with ease, and that's a huge deal.
There aren't too many Free solutions in there, I realize, but Linux can't be everything to everyone and remain completely Free. I am sure there is a lot of GIMP action going on there but not many programs in the Free world are powerful enough to help out the big studios.
Film and processing for a movie can cost 1 - 3 million dollars. For Episode II it was estimated that Lucas would save 3 million dollars by going to film. But of course the real advantage is effects being done while the production is still going.
The article (on yahoo) is pretty exagerated and sensationalistic, but the images are still very impressive, even they are about what you would expect at 2.5 FPS with such a powerful card. I think it is a pretty good indication of what the next generation of console games (after gamecube and x-box) will look like.
Yep, very true. Also, I think that a lot of people aren't considering that even though frames might have taken 90 min. on an SGI the entire frame is not rendered all at once. I don't know for sure if the 90 min. refers to the entire frame, but I doubt it. There are layers upon layer for backgrounds, main characters, the ghost alien phantom things, shadow passes, reflection passes, caustic passes (in rare cases) and on and on.
Ahhhh, the first rational comment I have seen yet on this topic. Also, where are their pictures? I find it odd that there are no shots of the render yet.
Re:oh my bad memory and deleted old stories
on
Final Fantasy At 2.5FPS
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· Score: 4, Interesting
No, he was absolutly correct. Toy story is not close to being rendered in real time yet and this isn't the same. There are many details to the REYES architecture that is used in PRman and likewise used to render toy story. One is the subdivision of NURBS patches and subdivision surfaces to the pixel level. Another is the surface, light, and volume shaders used. There are many many things that people are missing when they say 'Movie X rendered in real time'. What they really mean is 'Movie X rendered in near realtime, at a MUCH lower resolution, with a bajillion hacks to make it look as close as possible to the original.'
You have obviously never worked in a production environment. Rendering isn't everything. Nothing is everything. No one will ever be saying that rendering is the only thing, because anyone with half a brain cell knows that it isn't, and anyone who has ever looked at CG knows that you are stating the obvious.
Rendering fast is a big deal though. Actually, its a fucking big deal. The faster something can be rendered, that faster people can work because the interactivity is there. Many 3D programs are instituting semi-real time fully rendered previews over limited spaces, like Softimage, 3DS etc. Everyone realizes the extensive work that goes into a movie. Toy Story took around a month and a half to render, I don't think anyone thinks that a movie can be made in a month and a half and it probable never will. (A good movie that is). Fast rendering is what drives the animation industry by allowing more interactivity, more complexity, and an every increasingly powerful toolset.
I can't make a movie sitting here on my computer. I don't have the computing power for it. All of those other things keep me from the mecca of the one-man movie as well, but I could do them in theory. What I cannot overcome is the power it takes to render, and that takes computers, which likewise take money. So 'yippee' is right, it is a big deal to render faster.
Now does this particulare demo mean anything? Yes and no. Geforce 3's and Radeon 8500's won't mean anything to final rendering time for a while, that would take alot of programming that hasn't been done yet. But interactivity is a huge deal, and it makes all the difference in the world to an artist who doesn't want to be constrained.
Books are not cheap. I am a very heavy book collection, and many of the books cost me from $35-$60 being that they are very thick programming texts. Dropping $50 on a book is no light step for me, but it is something I am willing to do for knowledge.
Also, many people seem to hate the idea of reading off a computer screen. I don't like it, but it isn't that bad. In the case of e-books I would print them out however. You can fit a lot of information on a single page if you set the type and margins yourself (which of course might not be a viable option) and naturally double the information if you can somehow print double sided. I learned to use the build engine for making duke nukem 3D levels from printed.txt's and I have learned python, ruby, and SDL from computer screens so its not the uncomfortability for me, its that lack of protability. And LCD + laptop/palm could change that theoretically, but still not as good as paper.
It is a terrible injustice, and the DCMA just may be the pinnacle of corporate interests taking away personal rights, but I don't really care if Skylarov never gets out of jail. I wish that the charges would be dropped against him and that people would realize he is being persecuted for sharing information, but he is an author of many SPAM tools, and is one of the people that makes hiding your email address on slashdot necessary. I just don't feel good about making him the martyr for the DCMA because I want him to be put away and heavily fined, just not for this.
Onto e-books. I think they are a great idea, mainly because they have so much potential, which isn't being used because publishers seem so greedy and intent on making huge profits off of them. No one is going to pay the same price for an e-book, they just aren't. I am reading Advanced Renderman right now, and it cost $55. That's pretty fucking steep for paper and ink, but is well worth it in this case. I would have bought it in some kind of e-book format if I could have had it for $10-$15. That is still practically all profit once the system gets going, but publishers seem so intent on selling e-book for only slightly less than their paper counterparts, and that just isn't going to happen. Book piracy has already been happening for quite some time, and if they keep this shit up, the only reason anyone will buy an e-book is to crack it and distribute it.
Imagine starting your own website. When you are paying for bandwidth on a site that has a >100KB front page (like slashdot on my configuration) then it is definitly worth it. Not everyone is on broadband and many people won't be for a long long time. Saving bandwidth is always good, whatever the situation. And besides, many many page serves can be had (10,000 a day) off a very inexpensive computer (K6-2 400 Mhz) even on a complex website (scoop driven).
Right on. Once the 1.0 encoder comes out I will be ripping every CD that I can get my hands on into OGG. A lot of people are saying 'it won't catch on because mp3 was there first'. It could catch on if you wanted it to. It is better and it is Free. If you want it to catch on, then help and rip every CD you can find to OGG. Granted, it would help if there was a Audio Catalyst clone for linux and windows that did ogg, but I won't let it keep me from distributing vorbis goodness everywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
It really hasn't been too much of a problem because 3D programs have many features for rough compositing and fine tuned compositing can easily be done on another computer by just moving the image sequences over to the NT or SGI box and working on the composite shot there. There is shake for linux, but I know almost nothing about it. So its not really a problem because the 3D programs are made for compositing and modularity in a work pipeline in the first place. Premier and After Effects are more towards the middle end of the scale anyway, most high end studios use inferno on NT or SGI to composite, and that's not on Linux either.
So, I guess the answer is that it really isn't a shortcoming, the image standards are there and that's what really counts. Shockwave and Flash are more web stuff and I am not sure if exporter plugins for them are ported to Linux, but it doesn't matter a whole lot anyway, people doing that almost definitly have a NT or Mac box and they can use that to export to Flash and Shockwave, even if they did all the work on a Linux or SGI computer.
I am not sure exactly what you are refuting. I know that PRman is used for almost all CG in films with BMRT and Mental Ray filling in a few gaps here and there. Not all studios are working for film however.
I never said that PRman was new to linux.
Maya, SI, 3DS, LW, and Houdini are the serious 3D programs out there. They are the complete, commercial, 3D packages used for production work 95% of the time. Cinema 4D might be there too someday. Axis, being shown at siggraph was done entirely with 3DS. All of Blizzard's animation is done with 3DS. Those five programs are what people buy when they are in a production environment. I realize that there are many side programs that have special uses.
You are refuting statements that I have not made, so please, get a clue.
Premier and After Effects are not tied to a specific OS. Final Cut Pro and Director will probably never make it to Linux and it doesn't matter. This story is about 3D, not video. Video is a weak point for Linux but 3D is definitly not. There are standard file formats and they are called image sequences.
What I meant is that there are industries that require specialized software and they aren't going to be able to obtain open source versions of it. I realize that there may already be open source 3D apps, but they are nothing compared to the commercial high end, which has had 15 years to mature.
Hey, can you tell me how I can get information on Entropy? I check the website for updates everyday. I can't find out what the new and exciting architecture is because the white papers aren't posted yet. What's the deal?
This is false. Renderman is a specification, and not a program. You are probably referring to Photorealistic Renderman by Pixar. Renderman the specification is made up of a scene description language (ASCII and bytecode) and a shanding language that is written and compiled. Perl had barely been invented when the renderman specification was created. Renderman does not use Perl or Python, and I have never heard of PRman using Perl or Python.
This is almost completely false. Pixar used many Sun computers as their renderfarm, but I doubt Sun donated 1000 computers to them, and I didn't see a credit at the end. As for SGI's not being used in render farms .... http://www2.linuxjournal.com/cgi-bin/frames.pl/ind ex.html There is a picture on that page which proves you very wrong.
This is a pretty big issue so I feel I should run down some of the more important points.
First, yes, SGI offered Linux systems a long time ago and to my knowledge they have done very poorly. They were however for workstations and not rendering, as IBM's newest offerings seem to be. IBM is probably going into workstations too, but that isn't what the article is about. Many big companies with Big Money (TM) have invested a whole ass ton in SGI clusters over the years, from Onyx computers for compositing and play back, to Octanes for creation, to Origin's for processing job queues.
Everyone is switching to Linux. PC's are so cheap and close to what SGI has to offer that it stands out as a clear solution. Pentium 4's and Athalon 4's are including more features suitable to rendering. SIMD instructions are great stuff for all the vector math that goes on behind the scenes. Linux costs nothing so when you have 1000 computers in your render farm you aren't paying $200,000 in licenses every few years. It is stable so that also helps everything, especially rendering. When a frame takes 8 hours to render, you don't want to worry about the OS crashing 6 hours through. You have 1000 computers and if they don't all work smoothly you are fucked. Lastly, Linux is unix, and that's important for an industry coming off of other unix platforms, mainly Irix.
Software for Linux is Good Stuff (TM) in the graphics world. As far as rendering goes, you have the mighty PRman, Mental Ray, Blue Moon Rendering Tools, Jig, Entropy, and many other renderers. That's good enough for just about any studio. On the software front, you have the magic four (or five, depending on how you look at it) of Maya 4 , Softimage XSI 2.0, 3D Studio 4, Lightwave 6.5, and Houdini. Maya and Houdini run on Linux right now and can be purchased for a small (huge) fee. Lightwave is the most ported 3D application that I know of and runs on Amiga (earlier versions), Windows NT, Sun OS, Solaris, Mac OS, Mac OS X, and Irix. It shouldn't be a huge deal to port to Linux. 3D Studio is another story. It has a deep history of being rooted in WinNT, and didn't even run on NT for Alpha when Alphas were all the rage so only time will tell. Also compositing software like Shake is making its way as well.
Last on the list is custom software. Pacific Data Images (Antz, Shrek) has written lots of software for Linux and ported lots from Irix as well. Linux is unix of course and that means that all the custom software that no one wanted to port from Irix to NT is now being ported to Linux with ease, and that's a huge deal.
There aren't too many Free solutions in there, I realize, but Linux can't be everything to everyone and remain completely Free. I am sure there is a lot of GIMP action going on there but not many programs in the Free world are powerful enough to help out the big studios.
I hope that clears some stuff up!
Film and processing for a movie can cost 1 - 3 million dollars. For Episode II it was estimated that Lucas would save 3 million dollars by going to film. But of course the real advantage is effects being done while the production is still going.
Lightwave, DivX, HDTV resolutions? Oh. Hell. Yes. I only wish my computer could play back all that DivX goodness.
I don't really see how 3000x2000 pixels could simulate 35mm film when the Ratio isn't even correct. movies are filmed at a 16x9 ratio not 3x2.
Can be found at http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=final_fantasy
The article (on yahoo) is pretty exagerated and sensationalistic, but the images are still very impressive, even they are about what you would expect at 2.5 FPS with such a powerful card. I think it is a pretty good indication of what the next generation of console games (after gamecube and x-box) will look like.
Yep, very true. Also, I think that a lot of people aren't considering that even though frames might have taken 90 min. on an SGI the entire frame is not rendered all at once. I don't know for sure if the 90 min. refers to the entire frame, but I doubt it. There are layers upon layer for backgrounds, main characters, the ghost alien phantom things, shadow passes, reflection passes, caustic passes (in rare cases) and on and on.
Ahhhh, the first rational comment I have seen yet on this topic. Also, where are their pictures? I find it odd that there are no shots of the render yet.
No, he was absolutly correct. Toy story is not close to being rendered in real time yet and this isn't the same. There are many details to the REYES architecture that is used in PRman and likewise used to render toy story. One is the subdivision of NURBS patches and subdivision surfaces to the pixel level. Another is the surface, light, and volume shaders used. There are many many things that people are missing when they say 'Movie X rendered in real time'. What they really mean is 'Movie X rendered in near realtime, at a MUCH lower resolution, with a bajillion hacks to make it look as close as possible to the original.'
You have obviously never worked in a production environment. Rendering isn't everything. Nothing is everything. No one will ever be saying that rendering is the only thing, because anyone with half a brain cell knows that it isn't, and anyone who has ever looked at CG knows that you are stating the obvious.
Rendering fast is a big deal though. Actually, its a fucking big deal. The faster something can be rendered, that faster people can work because the interactivity is there. Many 3D programs are instituting semi-real time fully rendered previews over limited spaces, like Softimage, 3DS etc. Everyone realizes the extensive work that goes into a movie. Toy Story took around a month and a half to render, I don't think anyone thinks that a movie can be made in a month and a half and it probable never will. (A good movie that is). Fast rendering is what drives the animation industry by allowing more interactivity, more complexity, and an every increasingly powerful toolset.
I can't make a movie sitting here on my computer. I don't have the computing power for it. All of those other things keep me from the mecca of the one-man movie as well, but I could do them in theory. What I cannot overcome is the power it takes to render, and that takes computers, which likewise take money. So 'yippee' is right, it is a big deal to render faster.
Now does this particulare demo mean anything? Yes and no. Geforce 3's and Radeon 8500's won't mean anything to final rendering time for a while, that would take alot of programming that hasn't been done yet. But interactivity is a huge deal, and it makes all the difference in the world to an artist who doesn't want to be constrained.
You forgot Sony Pictures Classics, from which 'Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon' was published.
Thats a very valid point.
s/am/have/
Books are not cheap. I am a very heavy book collection, and many of the books cost me from $35-$60 being that they are very thick programming texts. Dropping $50 on a book is no light step for me, but it is something I am willing to do for knowledge.
Also, many people seem to hate the idea of reading off a computer screen. I don't like it, but it isn't that bad. In the case of e-books I would print them out however. You can fit a lot of information on a single page if you set the type and margins yourself (which of course might not be a viable option) and naturally double the information if you can somehow print double sided. I learned to use the build engine for making duke nukem 3D levels from printed .txt's and I have learned python, ruby, and SDL from computer screens so its not the uncomfortability for me, its that lack of protability. And LCD + laptop/palm could change that theoretically, but still not as good as paper.
It is a terrible injustice, and the DCMA just may be the pinnacle of corporate interests taking away personal rights, but I don't really care if Skylarov never gets out of jail. I wish that the charges would be dropped against him and that people would realize he is being persecuted for sharing information, but he is an author of many SPAM tools, and is one of the people that makes hiding your email address on slashdot necessary. I just don't feel good about making him the martyr for the DCMA because I want him to be put away and heavily fined, just not for this.
Onto e-books. I think they are a great idea, mainly because they have so much potential, which isn't being used because publishers seem so greedy and intent on making huge profits off of them. No one is going to pay the same price for an e-book, they just aren't. I am reading Advanced Renderman right now, and it cost $55. That's pretty fucking steep for paper and ink, but is well worth it in this case. I would have bought it in some kind of e-book format if I could have had it for $10-$15. That is still practically all profit once the system gets going, but publishers seem so intent on selling e-book for only slightly less than their paper counterparts, and that just isn't going to happen. Book piracy has already been happening for quite some time, and if they keep this shit up, the only reason anyone will buy an e-book is to crack it and distribute it.
Imagine starting your own website. When you are paying for bandwidth on a site that has a >100KB front page (like slashdot on my configuration) then it is definitly worth it. Not everyone is on broadband and many people won't be for a long long time. Saving bandwidth is always good, whatever the situation. And besides, many many page serves can be had (10,000 a day) off a very inexpensive computer (K6-2 400 Mhz) even on a complex website (scoop driven).
Come on, be optimistic, I think it will be out at least a week before it actually hits theatrs.
Right on. Once the 1.0 encoder comes out I will be ripping every CD that I can get my hands on into OGG. A lot of people are saying 'it won't catch on because mp3 was there first'. It could catch on if you wanted it to. It is better and it is Free. If you want it to catch on, then help and rip every CD you can find to OGG. Granted, it would help if there was a Audio Catalyst clone for linux and windows that did ogg, but I won't let it keep me from distributing vorbis goodness everywhere.