Figuring out how much data the The Lord of the Rings project would create was the starting point for Jon Labrie. "The three films are being shot simultaneously," he says, "and we're creating the effects for all three films in a single block."
"We expect to create and manage 100 Terabytes of data before this show is over. It's my job to plan for that growth and to meet the infrastructure challenges associated with it."
"There are 200 people in the Weta production facility, every one of them involved heavily in the creation of a lot of digital data. I think of it as a kind of blizzard or storm of data flying through the facility," Labrie says. "What we're about is the ability to move large amount of information around the facility all day, every day, and we rely on SGI to help us do that. Ninety percent of our equipment is SGI."
Weta uses two SGI Origin 2000s as its primary file servers. One Origin 2000 is for near-line and offline tape-based storage. The other is for central online disk storage.
"Given the 100 Terabytes, we're demanding a lot from those file servers. We currently have four Terabytes of data on hard drives, which will eventually grow to 10. For nearline / offline storage we're using DMF, SGI's hierarchial storage management system. It's greatly simplified our management of the thousands of tapes needed to store the bulk of the data."
Weta's primary rendering resource is based on SGI I200 Linux servers. "Rendering hinges on the ability to efficiently use processor cycles," Labrie says." We have 32 dedicated processors today, and expect to extend that to well over 200 by the time we're finished."
"We also have 90 Octane Irix workstations for the principal artists, and another 25 or so Linux-based workstations that we're using primarily for paint, rotoscoping, and compositing. Tese systems also contribute to the rendering pool when available."
The Linux workstations run Nothing Real's Shake, which is the primary compositing application at Weta. An eight-processor Onyx II also runs Inferno, Discrete Logic's high-speed, single seat compositing system.
"We have a large number of seats running Maya, Alias/Wavefront's modelling, rendering and animation system. Maya is the core 3D application for the facility," Labrie says.
"We also have a number of other applications for niche requirements: Houdini for effect and particle animation; 3D Equalizer and Softimage for camera match-moving. There's a sprinkling of other things, and a lot of proprietary technologies that we've been working on specifically for The Lord of the Rings.
"There are unique graphical applications that PEter Jackson has asked us to create. We've been in research and development for three years, planning and working on standalone proprietary systems or extensions to off-the-shelf applications. We're moving into the actual production of shots now."
"We've been writing custom extensions to Maya for the past two years to improve the look and performance of our computer-generated characters."
"Over the past four years we've used SGI wrokstations to custom-build a new crowd animation system, called Massive. We're using Massive for battle animation scenes with hundreds of thousands of fighting, screaming, and dying Orcs, Elves and all the other magical and fantastical creates that appear in The Lord of the Rings."
"For those sorts of graphical challenges, we prefer to work in the Irix/Unix world. The graphics available to us on the SGI platforms make our jobs easier. Of the 140 special-effects artists that will work on this project, nine out of 10 will work on SGI workstations."
"There are both classic and unique IT challenges," says Labrie. "Classic challenges are the kinds of IT issues any company would expect to face: What sort of networking technology you use, how do you manage backups and disaster recover? What kind of workstation is typical for a user? This typically breaks down to 'what's the fastest machine I can use to achieve what I need in a reasonable time for a reasonable cost'?"
"The unique challenges are things that are specific to digital visual effects for film. Every director wants to deliver a unique viewing experience, to show people things they've never seen before. We break down those expectations and requirements into specific etchnical challenges and get to work on them. The results could be as mundane as a new way of describing the internal skeleton of a creature or as fantastic as Massive."
The three movies are The Fellowship of the Ring (to be release worldwide on 14 December 2001), The Two Towers (December 2002), and The Return of the King (December 2003). The trilogy shoot should wrap up early next year.
Quake doesn't get people angry enough to kill their mother or shoot their high school teachers.
I agree with you 100% It wasn't Quake that made me angry it was HIGH SCHOOL!
Join me in my efforts to have high schools placed under public criticism - Perhaps we can even have them banned. Seriously, write your congressmen and tell them that it's those fucking smug teachers with their $24,000 a year salary that makes kids go ballistic - Not the games they play to unwind after coming home from a stressful day of school.
I've been using Redhat since v4.2 - Generally I've had no real greif with what they've done, for the most part Redhat turns out a good product. Upon installation of RH7 however the decision that it was time to switch teams suddenly became alot easier to make - I'm now happily using Debian.
For starters, I had to wait literally hours to get disc two only to have it install ONE ROTTEN PACKAGE! Basically all that time was wasted so the RH installer could install sudo!
After that was finished I went to compiling kernel 2.2.17 only to find that it would compile at all! Frustrated I got my other linux box pulling down ISO images for a certain other distro.
In a nutshell, the fine folks at Redhat helped me make the decision to use Debian - something that I've always wanted to do but have never had the motivation to get around to. I'm never going back.
It seems that everyone around here has ants in their pants whenever kernel 2.4 is mentioned anywhere. Linux is growing up folks, and some people around here are acting like 5 year-olds in a toy store - they see it, they want it now, and they'll kick and scream untill they finally get it.
Linux has gotten a lot of press lately and that means that in addition to all the hackers' eyes, we've got the media paying quite a bit of attention too. Rather than bashing Linus for going 'corporate' and doing his job at Transmeta instead of devoting every single waking moment to 2.4, we should be grateful that such attention is being payed to quality. If we're going to win the battle agains MS we're going to need some pretty kickass software to do it with.
I think that one of the major things holding back opensource development on Mac is the lack of readily available _free_ compilers. Sure there's Apple's MPW but it doesn't come standard with the MacOS. How can you expect your users to download the 21 megs worth of MPW just to compile your software. I don't mind downloading source for an application under linux because it's simply:
> tar xvfz sourcefile.tar.gz > cd sourcefile/ >./configure;make;sudo make install
Simply because I already have gcc installed with my distro. However, under MacOS it's a much larger headache - especially if the user doesn't have MPW (which is 98% of Mac users anyway). Just my $0.02
...Although Slashdot touts itself as being "News for Nerds" this isn't news. On April 11th it was news, but now it's just noise.
Hotgrits.org questions answered here!
on
Hump Day Quickies
·
· Score: 1
Let me preface this post by clarifying that yes, I did help with the hotgrits.org project.
Please note that hotgrits DOES NOT run Slashcode, nor does it run PhpSlash. The wheel was reinvented, simply because it's funner that way.
Finally, please be gentle. The box is only a K6/233 with 64MB of RAM. It's just an old junker we had laying around and thought "Wouldn't it be funny if..." - And the rest is history!
Rather than trying to decide what language should be the norm, or developing a new one what if we did this....
Why not have a web proxy that essentially performs the same action as the Babelfish? You could configure your proxy to automatically translate everything into your native tongue.
I tend to disagree with what everyone seems to be saying here. Just hold your horses, and breathe through your nose for a minute while I share my humble opinion...
I think there should be a standardizing of UI's for Linux. Everytime I bring this up everybody bitches and moans about how if we standardize the Linux UI it'll get "...as fuck ugly as Windows..." Let's get one thing straight - I DONT WANT TO STANDARDIZE THE GUI - Just parts of the UI. If we standardize the GUI, we'll lose our artistic expression. Personally I think the KDE kids are doing a nice job, but it's sooo damn ugy. That's why I use E(yecandy)nlightenment.
The reasoning for standardizing the UI is to remedy all the blasted different ways programs behave. For example, in some programs, to quit the hotkey is 'CRTL-Q', while in others its 'ALT-Q', or ':q!', or even 'CRTL-X CRTL-C'. And to save it's the same problem - 'CRTL-S', 'ALT-S', ':w' or that awful 'CRTL-X CRTL-S'.
Why can't we just set aside our differences and play nice?
Slashdot Mirror
BUSH!
Don't blame me - I voted for Kodos.
Try ActiveGuitar.com - they seem to have all that OLGA had.
Lords of the Terabytes
Figuring out how much data the The Lord of the Rings project would create was the starting point for Jon Labrie. "The three films are being shot simultaneously," he says, "and we're creating the effects for all three films in a single block."
"We expect to create and manage 100 Terabytes of data before this show is over. It's my job to plan for that growth and to meet the infrastructure challenges associated with it."
"There are 200 people in the Weta production facility, every one of them involved heavily in the creation of a lot of digital data. I think of it as a kind of blizzard or storm of data flying through the facility," Labrie says. "What we're about is the ability to move large amount of information around the facility all day, every day, and we rely on SGI to help us do that. Ninety percent of our equipment is SGI."
Weta uses two SGI Origin 2000s as its primary file servers. One Origin 2000 is for near-line and offline tape-based storage. The other is for central online disk storage.
"Given the 100 Terabytes, we're demanding a lot from those file servers. We currently have four Terabytes of data on hard drives, which will eventually grow to 10. For nearline / offline storage we're using DMF, SGI's hierarchial storage management system. It's greatly simplified our management of the thousands of tapes needed to store the bulk of the data."
Weta's primary rendering resource is based on SGI I200 Linux servers. "Rendering hinges on the ability to efficiently use processor cycles," Labrie says." We have 32 dedicated processors today, and expect to extend that to well over 200 by the time we're finished."
"We also have 90 Octane Irix workstations for the principal artists, and another 25 or so Linux-based workstations that we're using primarily for paint, rotoscoping, and compositing. Tese systems also contribute to the rendering pool when available."
The Linux workstations run Nothing Real's Shake, which is the primary compositing application at Weta. An eight-processor Onyx II also runs Inferno, Discrete Logic's high-speed, single seat compositing system.
"We have a large number of seats running Maya, Alias/Wavefront's modelling, rendering and animation system. Maya is the core 3D application for the facility," Labrie says.
"We also have a number of other applications for niche requirements: Houdini for effect and particle animation; 3D Equalizer and Softimage for camera match-moving. There's a sprinkling of other things, and a lot of proprietary technologies that we've been working on specifically for The Lord of the Rings.
"There are unique graphical applications that PEter Jackson has asked us to create. We've been in research and development for three years, planning and working on standalone proprietary systems or extensions to off-the-shelf applications. We're moving into the actual production of shots now."
"We've been writing custom extensions to Maya for the past two years to improve the look and performance of our computer-generated characters."
"Over the past four years we've used SGI wrokstations to custom-build a new crowd animation system, called Massive. We're using Massive for battle animation scenes with hundreds of thousands of fighting, screaming, and dying Orcs, Elves and all the other magical and fantastical creates that appear in The Lord of the Rings."
"For those sorts of graphical challenges, we prefer to work in the Irix/Unix world. The graphics available to us on the SGI platforms make our jobs easier. Of the 140 special-effects artists that will work on this project, nine out of 10 will work on SGI workstations."
"There are both classic and unique IT challenges," says Labrie. "Classic challenges are the kinds of IT issues any company would expect to face: What sort of networking technology you use, how do you manage backups and disaster recover? What kind of workstation is typical for a user? This typically breaks down to 'what's the fastest machine I can use to achieve what I need in a reasonable time for a reasonable cost'?"
"The unique challenges are things that are specific to digital visual effects for film. Every director wants to deliver a unique viewing experience, to show people things they've never seen before. We break down those expectations and requirements into specific etchnical challenges and get to work on them. The results could be as mundane as a new way of describing the internal skeleton of a creature or as fantastic as Massive."
The three movies are The Fellowship of the Ring (to be release worldwide on 14 December 2001), The Two Towers (December 2002), and The Return of the King (December 2003). The trilogy shoot should wrap up early next year.
I've gotten the best reaction time so far - 0.007 seconds!
Click here to check it out!
Wow from the looks of it, the yellow one kicked the purple one's ass up and down the quadrant!
Don't forget the spray-on hair - you gotta have the spray-on hair.
Quake doesn't get people angry enough to kill their mother or shoot their high school teachers.
I agree with you 100% It wasn't Quake that made me angry it was HIGH SCHOOL!
Join me in my efforts to have high schools placed under public criticism - Perhaps we can even have them banned. Seriously, write your congressmen and tell them that it's those fucking smug teachers with their $24,000 a year salary that makes kids go ballistic - Not the games they play to unwind after coming home from a stressful day of school.
I've been using Redhat since v4.2 - Generally I've had no real greif with what they've done, for the most part Redhat turns out a good product. Upon installation of RH7 however the decision that it was time to switch teams suddenly became alot easier to make - I'm now happily using Debian.
For starters, I had to wait literally hours to get disc two only to have it install ONE ROTTEN PACKAGE! Basically all that time was wasted so the RH installer could install sudo!
After that was finished I went to compiling kernel 2.2.17 only to find that it would compile at all! Frustrated I got my other linux box pulling down ISO images for a certain other distro.
In a nutshell, the fine folks at Redhat helped me make the decision to use Debian - something that I've always wanted to do but have never had the motivation to get around to. I'm never going back.
It seems that everyone around here has ants in their pants whenever kernel 2.4 is mentioned anywhere. Linux is growing up folks, and some people around here are acting like 5 year-olds in a toy store - they see it, they want it now, and they'll kick and scream untill they finally get it.
Linux has gotten a lot of press lately and that means that in addition to all the hackers' eyes, we've got the media paying quite a bit of attention too. Rather than bashing Linus for going 'corporate' and doing his job at Transmeta instead of devoting every single waking moment to 2.4, we should be grateful that such attention is being payed to quality. If we're going to win the battle agains MS we're going to need some pretty kickass software to do it with.
I am currently downloading the second ISO image. It's available today.>
Which mirror are you using?
Did you also type up this post waiting patiently for Hemos to post?
My Toshiba Tecra has a 12.1" display and I've got X running at 1024x768 with 16bpp
Taken from the WU website...
Helping people make their lives better, everyday
n0w 7h3 f45735t w4y 70 53nd m0n3y (70 31337 h4x0r d00dz)
My distro doesn't have dselect or rpm - Yay slack!
I think that one of the major things holding back opensource development on Mac is the lack of readily available _free_ compilers. Sure there's Apple's MPW but it doesn't come standard with the MacOS. How can you expect your users to download the 21 megs worth of MPW just to compile your software. I don't mind downloading source for an application under linux because it's simply:
> tar xvfz sourcefile.tar.gz
> cd sourcefile/
>
Simply because I already have gcc installed with my distro. However, under MacOS it's a much larger headache - especially if the user doesn't have MPW (which is 98% of Mac users anyway). Just my $0.02
I just bought an Athlon 800 yesterday!
Wrong cartoon... ;)
...Although Slashdot touts itself as being "News for Nerds" this isn't news. On April 11th it was news, but now it's just noise.
Let me preface this post by clarifying that yes, I did help with the hotgrits.org project.
Please note that hotgrits DOES NOT run Slashcode, nor does it run PhpSlash. The wheel was reinvented, simply because it's funner that way.
Finally, please be gentle. The box is only a K6/233 with 64MB of RAM. It's just an old junker we had laying around and thought "Wouldn't it be funny if..." - And the rest is history!
Umm, you might be checking the _old_ slashdot on Netcraft. I got these results.
64.28.67.48 is running Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) mod_perl/1.22 on Linux
Rather than trying to decide what language should be the norm, or developing a new one what if we did this....
Why not have a web proxy that essentially performs the same action as the Babelfish? You could configure your proxy to automatically translate everything into your native tongue.
>> One at a time? After the first few hundred, others might take notice.
There are a few hundred Dr. Dre fans?!
> CNN.com has a story about two Russian astronuts (yes, I say nuts)
Last time I checked, Russian astronauts were called cosmonauts.
Wouldn't that make them cosmonuts? (yes, I say nuts)
I tend to disagree with what everyone seems to be saying here. Just hold your horses, and breathe through your nose for a minute while I share my humble opinion...
I think there should be a standardizing of UI's for Linux. Everytime I bring this up everybody bitches and moans about how if we standardize the Linux UI it'll get "...as fuck ugly as Windows..." Let's get one thing straight - I DONT WANT TO STANDARDIZE THE GUI - Just parts of the UI. If we standardize the GUI, we'll lose our artistic expression. Personally I think the KDE kids are doing a nice job, but it's sooo damn ugy. That's why I use E(yecandy)nlightenment.
The reasoning for standardizing the UI is to remedy all the blasted different ways programs behave. For example, in some programs, to quit the hotkey is 'CRTL-Q', while in others its 'ALT-Q', or ':q!', or even 'CRTL-X CRTL-C'. And to save it's the same problem - 'CRTL-S', 'ALT-S', ':w' or that awful 'CRTL-X CRTL-S'.
Why can't we just set aside our differences and play nice?
The link for the auction can be found here.
http://cgi.ebay.co m/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=239850613
With this you could be the life of the party, impress your friends, and make julian fries in mere minutes! Seriously though, this is for a good cause.