[azipa] Linux Rocks The Motion Picture Industry

[J.L.Francois]

 ----------------------------------------------------------------

 X-Men's Special Effects Team Moving to Maya--and Linux:

 By Michelle Head

 While the X-Men wrestled with super-villains like Magneto
 onscreen, the film's post-production special effects designers
 wrestled with computer-generated villainy of another type--but
they expect Linux-based assistance soon from SGI, according to
 Bill Spitzak, lead software designer at special effects shop
 Digital Domain.
 
 Founded by a team of creative professionals that includes James
 Cameron (Terminator II, Titanic), Digital Domain is still
 Cameron's special effects shop of choice--and Twentieth Century
 Fox, makers of the recent hit movie X-Men, contracted Digital
 Domain to make their movie magic work as well.
 
 Unfortunately, Digital's work on the film didn't go as smoothly
 as the movie's effects might indicate. "Unfortunately, Linux
 wasn't really used for X-Men," Spitzak said. "The renderfarm
 was switched to [Windows] NT in order to run the LightWave
 renderer, and since we then ported our in-house stuff to NT as
 well, they seem reluctant to switch it back."
 
 The fact that Digital's current favorite renderer, LightWave,
 runs on NT is a source of frustration for Spitzak. "LightWave
 is really a serious block to using Linux in production," he
 explained. "Almost every other tool we use is ported to Linux
 (at least as a rendering engine). The NT renderfarm is really a
 pain, it talks very slowly to our NFS [network file system]
 servers and the machines crash so often that usually one-third
 of them are down, and it takes hours to reboot anything."
 
 While pondering this Linux-NT impasse, Spitzak has been trying
 to work out a compromise between the two systems. "About 90
 percent of the problems were from trying to use NT as a
 renderfarm. What we really need is reliable command-line UNIX
 tools that we can run on a renderfarm, perhaps much more than
 we need desktop Linux. Because of our use of NT desktop
 machines we would also like to see identical command line tools
 compiled for NT (we run a tcsh port on NT here). All artists
 use a tcsh port on NT and we are trying every way to make the
 NT machines resemble UNIX," he continued.
 
 Spitzak believes that a symbiotic relationship between NT and
 Linux or UNIX may be possible for the time being. "We also need
 a common solution to the fact that Microsoft refuses to
 implement symbolic links, thus making it impossible to have
 identical namespaces on UNIX and NT (this is obviously on
 purpose by Microsoft)," he said. "All our in-house software
 converts filenames between "z:/job/" and "/job/" to get around
 this, but this does not work for third-party software, and a
 common solution is needed," he explained.
 
 This compromise, Spitzak said, would require work on both sides
 of the equation."Conversely, it would be nice if the NT method
 of accessing remote machines "//machine/blah..." was supported
 on UNIX without explicit mount points," he explained. "We also
 need all the software people to make their programs use forward
 slashes for filenames (which NT supports, by the way). With   
 these sorts of fixes we will make it much easier to run scripts
 generated on an NT machine on a Linux renderfarm, and I think
 this is going to be necessary for Linux to be accepted as a
 renderfarm solution everywhere."

 While eager for other solutions, Spitzak isn't holding out for 
 the marriage of LightWave to Linux. "NewTek [LightWave's
 creator] has stated many times that they will never support
 anything other than NT (this seems odd as they were once an
 Amiga company)." Amiga currently has partnerships with
 companies that run Open Source projects; Sun Microsystems and
 Corel are two examples of Amiga business partnerships listed on
 the company's Web site.

 Instead, Spitzak sees the Linux cavalry riding in from another
 direction. "On a brighter note, we are increasingly going to
 Maya, and that is going to officially support Linux. We are  
 also investigating Linux desktop workstations, though I think
 we should get the renderfarm to be Linux first."

 SGI's subsidiary, Alias/Wavefront, seems ready to answer that  
 distress call. In a July 21 press release the company announced
 plans to port the entire Maya 3D software product line to
 Linux.
 
 Maya's movie muscle was demonstrated most recently in Warner  
 Bros. hit film, The Perfect Storm. Company officials said that
 the move to the Linux OS came in response to demands from
 special effects professionals that the software be made
 available to them.

 "Customer demand for a Linux version of Maya has driven this
 development," said Bob Bennett, general manager of the
 Entertainment Business Unit for Alias/Wavefront. "The technical
 committee of the Visual Effects Society recently hosted a
 meeting of leading effects professionals to discuss the
 importance of Linux to their community. The consensus of the 
 participants was that Linux will be a key operating system (OS)
 in visual effects work and urged software companies to be more
 forthcoming in support of Linux. We are responding to that call
 to action by announcing that Maya will be available on Linux.
 Our experience with UNIX has made this implementation of Maya
 both highly efficient and productive."

 Spitzak is looking forward to seeing Maya in action at Digital
Domain. "I am under the impression that Maya is superior to
 LightWave in most ways," he said. "Certainly Maya is immensely 
 popular as an NT modeler, so the fact that it runs on UNIX is 
 not the only reason for its success."

 While Spitzak does not have hands-on experience with Maya, he  
 awaits the software's availability for Linux, and does not    
 anticipate any trouble pairing the software to the Linux OS. I 
 was at Siggraph [an international conference on computer
 graphics and interactive techniques]. I did get to see Maya
 running there; Linux, IRIX, and NT versions. They are nearly
 identical, the same as I have seen for other software ported to
 Linux from IRIX or NT."

 The news of Maya's pending Linux debut comes on the heels of
 SGI's announcement that the company intends to produce
 Itanium-friendly servers in anticipation of Intel's Itanium
 64-bit processor. While Digital Domain does use SGI's IRIX on
 approximately 100 of its 600 boxes, Spitzak continues to
 believe that the more options special effects professionals
 have, the better. "I think SGI should put some effort into
 alternative processors. One advantage of Linux is that we
 should not be forced to use Intel processors only. Despite  
 worries to the contrary, I think even proprietary vendors may
 keep a machine around to compile for alternative Linux
 systems."

 Spitzak may be right about industry professionals needing more 
 creative options. But new super-powered tools for the
 technicians that gave Twentieth Century Fox's X-Men their
 box-office brawn seem to be to the audience's ultimate benefit.
 
 ----------------------------------------------------------------

 10 Ways to tell you've been online too long:

   1. Someone at work tells you a joke and you say "LOL" out
      loud.                                                 
   2. Three words: Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.
   3. You have to get a 2nd phone line just so you can call
      Pizza Hut.
   4. You watch TV with the closed captioning turned on.  
   5. You type messages to people while you are on the phone
      with them at the same time.
   6. You wake up in the morning and the first thing you do is  
      get online before you have your first cup of coffee.
   7. You type faster than you think.
   8. Your "buddy list" has over 100 people on it.
   9. You double-click your TV remote.
  10. Your dog leaves you.

 ----------------------------------------------------------------

JLF Sends...
When I said to people to use PGP/GPG for all email they laughed at me
and said they don't use encryption because they have nothing to hide
or it was too hard to learn and use.
When the press released that the USA FBI Carnivore system and UK RIP bill
allowed for easily reading their email, they called me to ask for help 
configuring PGP and GPG. I laughed.                ( J.L.Francois )


==AZIPA=========================================================
Arizona Internet Professionals Association Email Discussion List
Next Meeting: Monday, August 28th, 2000 - <http://www.azipa.org>
To switch among receiving individual emails or a daily digest or
just "read on web only" <http://www.egroups.com/subscribe/azipa>
You can select to receive email in html or plain text format at
<http://www.egroups.com/myprofile>
=========================================================AZIPA==