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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.
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