I couldn't agree more. I have done work with hypercubes... sure it was only a stupid sort algorithm, but it was order N when there were N Procs. (ok... it was 2N, but we know the multiplier is ignored).
Too often people jump on the "beowulf mentality" without really knowing what is out there and how they differ.
When we render, we copy the scene file local and render the images local. Then the images get copied back "online" so that the NFS servers do not get killed with open files for long periods of time. When it takes 20 some hours to write 1.8 mb of data over an NFS connection (with over 500 machines doing the exact same thing) the system is less than optimized.
I was just thinking about creating cheap hypercubes with net over firewire. As long as the routing is setup, you could have 4 connections on a machine plus the 10/100/1000 ethernet connection. A hypercube only needs 3. And one could get multiple cards. I know that PVM works well in such a situation as long as the procs initialize in the right order (proc 1 is always proc 1). Maybe this would be a good reasarch project.
I know when I was at school we worked on a 8 node system setup as a hypercube (it had 2 groups of 4 procs, so some of the "hypercube connections" were over a scsi bus instead of a true connection between the procs.) The procs were slow and the machine was expensive. Now somthing faster (with a slower backplane) can be built for less.
This is why a beowulf cluster is not always the answer.
Depending on what you are trying to solve, the problem may need to be split up differently. The algorithm to solve the problem and the system you are using need to match well.
Beowulf is great for high cpu intensive tasks with low network useage. Other forms of clustering are good for problems that use shared memory (but this starts to nail the network). Some tasks split up so that just a simple queuing system is all that is needed to do the work, all that you need to be able to do is have a manager job determine who does what and if it was done.
The monitors are color calibrated to the film out.
So you get used to matching some sort of standard that works when it is transfered to film.
-Tim
Re:Open source gives studios a headache
on
Film Gimp
·
· Score: 2
True.
I see more to the effect some studios wanting to open up some of their code for others to help develop as opposed to working on previously opened code.
I know I have considered opening up stuff that I have worked on, but unfortunately it is too site specific and I didn't make it modular enough to break apart.
Open source is used and loved by studios, I just don't know how much development goes on open source projects.
The other side of the coin is that many studios see the software and process of how they work as being what seperates them from other studios and it is what gives them a competitive advantage, so they do not want to release what makes them money. Studios that work on their own projects are a little more free because they know that as long as they have ideas and projects that they are releasing, they don't really care too much about working with other, similar studios.
Maybe not on the desktops, but on the render farms, some studios have more linux cpu power than most research institutes. At a fairly small studio, we had 500 dual proc systems clustered. I know that the larger, California based studios have at least twice as many. And some places make a big deal about ordering 200 boxes...
I hoped that they were making strong firewire net connections and ways of channeling the systems together into some sort of hypercube formation. That would make it appear as a true parallel processing system and giving some API to take advantage of it. I guess something like that is still possible and with firewire being fast and cheap, it is something that may be worth looking in to.
Working in the industry, the push for linux render farms was a few years ago. That is no longer new for a company to be switching over.
Now the switch is in the desktop department. It is not unheard of for studios to be switching to linux desktop systems.
Some studios have 2 linux desktops and 1 Mac for every 2 artists. Use the linux system for 3d, the Mac for 2d (photoshop and composites). It is possible that some might make the switch to macs all the way around, but that is one more platform for the big studios to custom code for. The port to the linux systems from the SGI is easier ( i believe) than it is to port to OS X.
There is that cost premium with them. And support. Neither of which are cheap. And at this stage in the game, I don't know how worthwhile it is.
Our studio switched from an SGI only house to some blend of Linux/IRIX. We are moving towards Linux only on the desktop, but it is possible for us to get some OS X boxes for compositing.
Depending on the level of work your friend is doing and how much raw power he needs, the choice can change. I assume that he would mostly be doing single frame renders. And if they are at high quality, he will need some serious horse power. Will he be using the Maya renderer or another one?
Our switch to Linux was decent since we came from a unix back ground. The users were used to the IRIX desktop and it did not take long for them to feel comfortable using gnome.
The OS X solution is extremely valid. I would have laughed at it a year ago, but having used Maya a bit on it and seeing just how well respected OS X is in the industry, I don't feel it is a bad way to go.
When there is only a few artists and not a big support staff, you have to go with a name brand system. It is unfortunate that a premium like that must be payed, but downtime is a big killer. When it can take a day or so to render and your system is down 2 days before something is needed, the preasure to get it going again is imense.
"I also have Poser to do human and animal posing, and this program is great. It is easy to use and intuitive. For doing animation of 3d human models it is perfect."
I have yet to see perfect human animation. Nor have I seen anybody who is anybody in animation using poser to animate humans.
From a pure rendering standpoint, I would suggest renderman or Mental Ray. Maya has a good renderer that has gotten a bad reputation, but it does a good job.
If you are looking for a package that does more than just render, using Maya plus plugins would be good. The downside to this is that with most of the plugins you have to redo the shaders for the renderer. This can take some work.
I would suggest looking at Maya's Personal Learning Edition to see if it can provide your needed quality. PLE is a nice, free learning edition of Maya, but it is not compatible with Maya's for purchase software. If the renderer doesn't do all that you need, look at using Weta's Liquid or Pixar's MTOR to go to renderman OR look at the MentalRay plugin.
I found one asset tracking program that was higher than beta. And it was an IT tracking system. Not digital asset management. True many results were returned, but most were in the beta stage or were in planning.
That is a bit different. Collision avoidance is a different bird all together. They used something for 101 Dalmations (live action) as well.
Sure it has some AI and the character sort of decides where to go, but typicaly, the inputs to the system are current location, goal location, speed and location of objects around it.
Had they just wanted to run the two armys together, it would be similar to the systems used earlier. But the difference here is that they decide what to do when they get together, or if they even get together.
I don't know how Penguins is currenly being produced but the first three episodes were created on SGI Octanes and rendered on Linux boxes. Jonah was created on both Linux and SGI systems as well as being rendered on Linux boxes (500+ dual proc systems).
Not as big or as fancy as finding Nemo, but it also cost 1/10th to produce as Monsters Inc. $12MM vs $150MM. Although not number 1 in the box office, it has been in the top ten every week but one since released.
Thats great, but I don't know how many studios will really take advantage of it.
Any studio that is working on a feature film will use solutions with tech support. When you are spending millions of dollars to make a film, it is worth spending a couple million to make sure that it really does get done.
For people with Maya that want an indexpensive solution, use the native renderer or possibly look at MentalRay. I used the native renderer in a feature film and it held its own (Jonah: A Veggietales Movie). Sure there were a few issues, but that is where tech support and documentation comes in. We would not have been able to finish without the help of Alias|Wavefront.
If you want to see how well it can do, go into the theater and watch it. Which, btw, was fully rendered on Linux boxes (if that is more of an incentive for us geek types to go).
The best thing I saw in the space series is how it mirrored his beliefs and views in Mere Christianity. The whole story starts off with showing the difference between a bent man and a broken man. And redemption. They are a wonderful read and do an excellent job of putting what Lewis believes into a less preachy format.
By other great book, I hope you mean other great *fiction* book.
I would say that Mere Christianity is his best book. Then I would place Screwtape Letters and then the Chronicles, and then the Space series. But all of them are great works.
I don't know anybody who uses maya on mac. I do think it will be a viable alternative some day, from what I understand, it is a bit slower still than it is on PCs.
Most Maya users I know are on SGIs or PCs (Linux or Windows).
Slashdot Mirror
I couldn't agree more. I have done work with hypercubes... sure it was only a stupid sort algorithm, but it was order N when there were N Procs. (ok... it was 2N, but we know the multiplier is ignored).
Too often people jump on the "beowulf mentality" without really knowing what is out there and how they differ.
When we render, we copy the scene file local and render the images local. Then the images get copied back "online" so that the NFS servers do not get killed with open files for long periods of time. When it takes 20 some hours to write 1.8 mb of data over an NFS connection (with over 500 machines doing the exact same thing) the system is less than optimized.
I was just thinking about creating cheap hypercubes with net over firewire. As long as the routing is setup, you could have 4 connections on a machine plus the 10/100/1000 ethernet connection. A hypercube only needs 3. And one could get multiple cards. I know that PVM works well in such a situation as long as the procs initialize in the right order (proc 1 is always proc 1). Maybe this would be a good reasarch project.
I know when I was at school we worked on a 8 node system setup as a hypercube (it had 2 groups of 4 procs, so some of the "hypercube connections" were over a scsi bus instead of a true connection between the procs.) The procs were slow and the machine was expensive. Now somthing faster (with a slower backplane) can be built for less.
-Tim
This is why a beowulf cluster is not always the answer.
Depending on what you are trying to solve, the problem may need to be split up differently. The algorithm to solve the problem and the system you are using need to match well.
Beowulf is great for high cpu intensive tasks with low network useage. Other forms of clustering are good for problems that use shared memory (but this starts to nail the network). Some tasks split up so that just a simple queuing system is all that is needed to do the work, all that you need to be able to do is have a manager job determine who does what and if it was done.
-Tim
The monitors are color calibrated to the film out.
So you get used to matching some sort of standard that works when it is transfered to film.
-Tim
True.
I see more to the effect some studios wanting to open up some of their code for others to help develop as opposed to working on previously opened code.
I know I have considered opening up stuff that I have worked on, but unfortunately it is too site specific and I didn't make it modular enough to break apart.
Open source is used and loved by studios, I just don't know how much development goes on open source projects.
The other side of the coin is that many studios see the software and process of how they work as being what seperates them from other studios and it is what gives them a competitive advantage, so they do not want to release what makes them money.
Studios that work on their own projects are a little more free because they know that as long as they have ideas and projects that they are releasing, they don't really care too much about working with other, similar studios.
-Tim
Maybe not on the desktops, but on the render farms, some studios have more linux cpu power than most research institutes.
At a fairly small studio, we had 500 dual proc systems clustered. I know that the larger, California based studios have at least twice as many. And some places make a big deal about ordering 200 boxes...
-Tim
I hoped that they were making strong firewire net connections and ways of channeling the systems together into some sort of hypercube formation.
That would make it appear as a true parallel processing system and giving some API to take advantage of it. I guess something like that is still possible and with firewire being fast and cheap, it is something that may be worth looking in to.
-Tim
Working in the industry, the push for linux render farms was a few years ago. That is no longer new for a company to be switching over.
Now the switch is in the desktop department. It is not unheard of for studios to be switching to linux desktop systems.
Some studios have 2 linux desktops and 1 Mac for every 2 artists. Use the linux system for 3d, the Mac for 2d (photoshop and composites). It is possible that some might make the switch to macs all the way around, but that is one more platform for the big studios to custom code for. The port to the linux systems from the SGI is easier ( i believe) than it is to port to OS X.
-Tim
but...
There is that cost premium with them. And support. Neither of which are cheap. And at this stage in the game, I don't know how worthwhile it is.
Our studio switched from an SGI only house to some blend of Linux/IRIX. We are moving towards Linux only on the desktop, but it is possible for us to get some OS X boxes for compositing.
Depending on the level of work your friend is doing and how much raw power he needs, the choice can change. I assume that he would mostly be doing single frame renders. And if they are at high quality, he will need some serious horse power. Will he be using the Maya renderer or another one?
Our switch to Linux was decent since we came from a unix back ground. The users were used to the IRIX desktop and it did not take long for them to feel comfortable using gnome.
The OS X solution is extremely valid. I would have laughed at it a year ago, but having used Maya a bit on it and seeing just how well respected OS X is in the industry, I don't feel it is a bad way to go.
When there is only a few artists and not a big support staff, you have to go with a name brand system. It is unfortunate that a premium like that must be payed, but downtime is a big killer. When it can take a day or so to render and your system is down 2 days before something is needed, the preasure to get it going again is imense.
-Tim
True enough. I forgot all about that.
I keep forgetting that Southpark is CG.
That was with an older version of the renderer. Many good improvements since then.
-Tim
According to this press release, it was lightwave. I would have noticed if it was maya since I try to keep up on its use in feature animation.
h tm l
http://www.newtek.com/news/releases/02-01-08-a.
I stand corrected.
Colin Doncaster's Liquid, not Weta's.
-Tim
Every studio that I know creates their own rigs and IK systems. If they use software, it is something that was written in house.
Now my experience has been with feature work and videos, but other people may use if they have other requirements.
-Tim
What blockbuster used Maya's renderer?
I know that Jonah did, but that can hardly be considered a blockbuster.
I agree with your rundown of what to use. I would encourage taking advantage of the Maya/Shake cross promotion that Apple has right now.
-Tim
"I also have Poser to do human and animal posing, and this program is great. It is easy to use and intuitive. For doing animation of 3d human models it is perfect."
I have yet to see perfect human animation. Nor have I seen anybody who is anybody in animation using poser to animate humans.
-Tim
I agree with you on this.
Maya is the best for me as well but for many other reasons...
Such as the free renderer license (which does nicely with 1000 procs to render)
MEL
The Maya ASCII file format.
But none of these have to do with the quality of the renderer (which has gotten much much better in 4.x)
-Tim
From a pure rendering standpoint, I would suggest renderman or Mental Ray. Maya has a good renderer that has gotten a bad reputation, but it does a good job.
If you are looking for a package that does more than just render, using Maya plus plugins would be good. The downside to this is that with most of the plugins you have to redo the shaders for the renderer. This can take some work.
I would suggest looking at Maya's Personal Learning Edition to see if it can provide your needed quality. PLE is a nice, free learning edition of Maya, but it is not compatible with Maya's for purchase software. If the renderer doesn't do all that you need, look at using Weta's Liquid or Pixar's MTOR to go to renderman OR look at the MentalRay plugin.
-Tim
No it didn't.
I found one asset tracking program that was higher than beta. And it was an IT tracking system. Not digital asset management. True many results were returned, but most were in the beta stage or were in planning.
-Tim
That is a bit different.
Collision avoidance is a different bird all together. They used something for 101 Dalmations (live action) as well.
Sure it has some AI and the character sort of decides where to go, but typicaly, the inputs to the system are current location, goal location, speed and location of objects around it.
Had they just wanted to run the two armys together, it would be similar to the systems used earlier. But the difference here is that they decide what to do when they get together, or if they even get together.
-Tim
Having worked on it, here is some more information:
3-2-1 Penguins!
Same company as " Jonah a Veggietales movie", which is still in the theaters.
I don't know how Penguins is currenly being produced but the first three episodes were created on SGI Octanes and rendered on Linux boxes. Jonah was created on both Linux and SGI systems as well as being rendered on Linux boxes (500+ dual proc systems).
Not as big or as fancy as finding Nemo, but it also cost 1/10th to produce as Monsters Inc. $12MM vs $150MM. Although not number 1 in the box office, it has been in the top ten every week but one since released.
-Tim
Thats great, but I don't know how many studios will really take advantage of it.
Any studio that is working on a feature film will use solutions with tech support. When you are spending millions of dollars to make a film, it is worth spending a couple million to make sure that it really does get done.
For people with Maya that want an indexpensive solution, use the native renderer or possibly look at MentalRay. I used the native renderer in a feature film and it held its own (Jonah: A Veggietales Movie). Sure there were a few issues, but that is where tech support and documentation comes in. We would not have been able to finish without the help of Alias|Wavefront.
If you want to see how well it can do, go into the theater and watch it. Which, btw, was fully rendered on Linux boxes (if that is more of an incentive for us geek types to go).
-Tim
I have to second that on Maya's renderer.
We used it for a feature film... and it turned out great.
Jonah: A Veggietales Movie
-Tim
This reminds me of one of our online games...
d _p enguin/default.htm
http://www.bigideafun.com/penguins/arcade/space
Unfortunately for some, it takes shockwave or whatever it is that handles the "director" mime type.
-Tim
The best thing I saw in the space series is how it mirrored his beliefs and views in Mere Christianity. The whole story starts off with showing the difference between a bent man and a broken man. And redemption. They are a wonderful read and do an excellent job of putting what Lewis believes into a less preachy format.
-Tim
By other great book, I hope you mean other great *fiction* book.
I would say that Mere Christianity is his best book. Then I would place Screwtape Letters and then the Chronicles, and then the Space series. But all of them are great works.
-Tim
I don't know anybody who uses maya on mac.
I do think it will be a viable alternative some day, from what I understand, it is a bit slower still than it is on PCs.
Most Maya users I know are on SGIs or PCs (Linux or Windows).
-Tim