[Solar-general] cine y gnu/linux

Mie Jul 28 00:22:18 CEST 2004

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0HEN/is_8_31/ai_108300138 

For Star Wars: Episode II, Linux made Yoda a light saber-wielding action
figure. In Lord of the Rings 2, waves of Orcs attacking the colossal fortress
at Helm's Deep are not thousands of human extras, but digital actors created
using Linux. To consumers, Linux may rank third after Windows and Macintosh,
but Linux dominates motion pictures more than anyone but studio insiders may
realize. It has been used to produce more than 30 blockbuster films, including
Lord of the Rings, Star Wars: Episode II, Harry Potter, Shrek, and Titanic.

In short, the big news in Hollywood about Linux is it is no longer big news.
Linux has won not only renderfarm servers, but the artist desktops of the top
studios. It's hard to find a large studio that does not rely upon Linux as its
primary animation and special effects OS, and many smaller film studios have
adopted Linux, too.

At the software level, studios are using Linux versions of some of the leading
commercial applications for 3D animation, compositing, special effects, and
rendering - Alias Maya, Apple Shake, and Pixar RenderMan. Internally, the
major studios have ported millions of lines of proprietary code to Linux and
are creating their new programs in Linux.

Linux began in 1991 as grad student Linus Torvalds' personal hobby. How did it
become a professional graphics powerhouse in the most demanding of CG industries?

Humble Beginnings

Linux got its commercial boost as a platform to serve web pages. During the
Internet boom Linux captured a third of the ISP server market on its
effectiveness powering Apache web servers. What Internet companies like about
Linux servers is they are fast and cheap. Movie studio technologists saw the
parallel between a rack of Apache servers outputting web pages and a rack of
renderfarm servers outputting movie frames. It begged the question: could
Linux make movies faster and cheaper?

Linux got its big Hollywood break in 1997 when Digital Domain (D2) used Linux
to render the special effects for Titanic. D2 has now used Linux for more than
two dozen motion pictures, including best visual effects Academy Award winners
Titanic and What Dreams May Come.

Before taking the plunge (so to speak) with Titanic, effects studio Digital
Domain had proven that Linux could coexist with its existing SGI renderfarm in
tests on Dante's Peak. Being able to transition smoothly from UNIX on SGI was
key to the adoption of Linux.

Since then, Linux renderfarm technology has matured to the point a studio such
as Sony can install a hundred Linux Intel renderfarm servers and have them up
and running in one hour. Linux machines come from the manufacturer (such as HP
or IBM or Dell) with software preloaded to each studio's specification.

Linux on the Graphics Desktop

Making Linux a success on servers and renderfarms was simple compared to the
next step - the desktop.

The chief obstacle: graphics drivers. Linux graphics performance was terrible,
much slower than other operating systems. Linux lacked the proprietary
accelerated 3D graphics drivers available on SGI workstations. Breakthroughs
by nVidia and other PC game card manufacturers had made graphics performance
on Windows stellar. Microsoft Windows seemed poised to take over Hollywood.

When large studios tried converting to Windows it was much harder than
expected. Rewriting millions of lines of internal UNIX code to run on Windows
would take forever.

Meanwhile, nVidia created a new graphics driver for Linux, using the same
high-performance code in both its Windows and Linux versions (and now FreeBSD,
too). Linux went from having the worst graphics performance to the best. In
addition to nVidia, many PC graphics card manufacturers began offering
high-performance Linux drivers.

So what did the availability of high-performance graphics cards for Linux mean
in the working world of ILM? "More than 350 Linux boxes were deployed during
Episode II," says ILM production engineering manager Ken Beyer. Six hundred
Linux desktops will be used for Star Wars: Episode III to be released summer 2005.

Linux Speed

DreamWorks' Shrek, released in 2001, was the first blockbuster to be both
authored and rendered using Linux. In fact, DreamWorks SKG did more than
convert their existing studios in Palo Alto and Glendale. They built a second
Linux production pipeline to double their Glendale capacity. "For production
of Sinbad every workstation and the entire renderfarm was Linux," notes
DreamWorks head of animation technology Ed Leonard.

Back at ILM, sequence supervisor Robert Weaver noticed a tremendous
performance boost upgrading from RISC workstations to Linux PCs during Star
Wars: Episode II. "The old system was so slow that the clones firing lasers
appear to be throwing javelins," says Weaver. "We've seen about a 5x speed
improvement in Linux. I'd say Linux is one of the most successful efforts
we've had. I can't say enough good things about it. It is intuitive,
incredibly stable, and we can get stuff fixed at a moment's notice."

DreamWorks' Ed Leonard says the performance of Linux-based machines makes
artists more productive. "To dramatically reduce costs was one of the big
motivating factors in moving animators to Linux," says Leonard. "But it is our
animators' productivity that really counts."

The transition at Weta Digital to Linux occurred during production on Lord of
the Rings. Weta Digital used software called Massive to create the hordes of
digital Orcs in Lord of the Rings 2. "Autonomous characters could only be done
in a limited way before," says Massive developer Stephen Regelous. "There's no
way you can animate a hundred thousand characters in any other software in a
reasonable amount of time," says Regelous. "Massive runs twice as fast on
Linux as it does on Windows."

Why Open Source Rocks Hollywood

It seems ironic that Linux dominates at studios known for building secret
proprietary technology to gain competitive advantage. What's happened is
Hollywood has recognized that having a standard open platform to develop upon
enables them to dedicate more of their resources to creating their secret
sauce, the technology that sets them apart as a studio.

Contrary to common sense, to build the best secret proprietary software you
need an open-source platform underneath it. The reason is that proprietary
software can require tweaks to the operating system itself that no proprietary
operating system vendor would be interested in implementing. Moreover, motion
picture production is a very time-sensitive business. A problem in the
operating system can't be allowed to hold up production. With open source,
studios can throw programmers at anything, whether at the software or OS level.

Some studios have more than a hundred Linux programmers, normally working on
internal proprietary software. Although not inclined to do so because of the
expense, in an emergency a studio can re-task a small army of Linux
programmers. Linux companies supporting the studios are often tiny by
comparison. Studio technologists are bemused by Linux vendors trying to
impress them with their "large engineering staff" of five or 10 programmers.

Top Software Vendors Join Linux

Of course, not all motion picture CG is done on proprietary software.
Commercial software packages have a long history and vital role in motion
picture production. When DreamWorks/PDI produced Shrek on a Linux platform, it
was done using internally developed software. Little commercial software for
making movies was available for Linux then.

Now, three of the most popular 3D animation drawing packages are available in
Linux versions: SideFx Houdini (Linux in 1999), Alias Maya (Linux in 2001),
and SoftImage (Linux in 2001). The Linux conversion touched off an unusual
amount of software upgrade activity at the major studios, which will often
stick with an older version indefinitely as long as it works. When ILM
switched to Linux it meant upgrading all of the studio's old copies of
SGI-based SoftImage software to Linux all at once.

An irony of the migration of software to Linux is that Apple and Pixar became
leading suppliers of Linux software. The most popular motion picture
compositing software - Apple Shake (Linux in 2000) - and the most popular
renderer - Pixar RenderMan (Linux in 1999) - are both sold by companies headed
by Steve Jobs. Jobs hasn't made any pro-Linux statements regarding the future
of his products (and recently Apple dropped the price of the Apple version of
Shake so much that the Apple computer to run it seemed free). How the
Mac/Linux equation will play out remains a concern for studios intent on
controlling their destiny by staying with an open-source operating system
rather than beholden to a proprietary third-party platform.

The Next Open-Source Platform?