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Graphics Software

Alias|Wavefront Ships Linux Software 90

Posted by Hemos from the making-things-look-pretty dept.
NumberCruncher wrote to us from the rendering front, where Alias|Wavefront has announced that it has shipped Maya Batch Renderer for Linux. The software does optimized tile-based rendering and selective ray-tracing.
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Alias|Wavefront Ships Linux Software More

Alias|Wavefront Ships Linux Software

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  • Re:Rendering under Linux (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Maya is more than just a raytracer. It is a complete modelling / animation / rendering / dynamics / visual effects package.

    You can read more about Maya at http://www.aw.s gi.com/entertainment/solutions/about_maya/index.ht ml [sgi.com].

    Raytracing and vector drawing are very different. Here is a grossly oversimplied summary: In raytracing, you loop across each pixel in your image and determine the colour by following the rays of light backwards through the 3D scene. Raytracing naturally allows you to model things like reflection, refraction, translucent object, fogs and a host of other cool effects but it is computationally expensive. You typically do raytracing if you need photo-realistic picture quality. Vector drawing done by looping over each object in the scene, transforming the vertices, and drawing a transformed version of the object. This is not very flexible but can be easily implemented in hardware making it very fast. You typically do vector drawing when you need to render an image very quickly (eg. in a computer game).

  • First Cut-N-Paste (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I'm posting this as a service to help people with slow links, This is the text from the article which is located at http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/000313/alias_wave_1.ht ml

    Monday March 13, 8:12 am Eastern Time
    Company Press Release
    SOURCE: Alias|Wavefront
    Alias|Wavefront Ships Maya Batch Renderer for Linux
    Digital Content Creation Artists Can Now Take Advantage of the Performance And Reliability Offered by Linux While Rendering with Maya
    TORONTO, March 13 /PRNewswire/ -- Alias|Wavefront(TM), an SGI (NYSE: SGI - news) company, today announced shipment of its Maya® Batch Renderer for the Linux® platform. Alias|Wavefront offers this powerful software application capable of rendering all elements of a scene created in Maya at film quality with optimized tile-based rendering and selective ray-tracing. The Maya renderer is capable of creating stunning photorealistic images as well as artistic ``hand-made'' organic results.

    The Maya Batch Renderer on Linux allows artists in the film and video, games, interactive media, industrial design and visualization markets to render work created with the leading CGI software on a robust operating system running on a wide variety of Intel®-based platforms. The combination of Linux and competitively priced hardware makes this a particularly cost effective solution for a wide variety of applications. In addition to continuing its commitment to IRIX® and Windows NT®, Alias|Wavefront offers Maya users additional flexibility in selecting hardware and software configurations appropriate to their needs.

    ``Many customers have asked for the Maya Batch Renderer to take advantage of the reliability and stability of Linux running on Intel processors,'' said Chris Ford, Maya Product Manager for Alias|Wavefront. ``Our prior experience with UNIX made the implementation of the batch renderer on Linux relatively straightforward, and we are extremely pleased with its resulting stability and performance,'' he added.

    ``Using the Maya Batch Renderer on Linux, I can render or read scenes and textures across the network,'' said Geoffrey Hancock, lead 3D Artist for Vancouver-based GVFX. ``The Linux operating system interface is very fast, and seems very stable, even beyond Unix and NT,'' he maintained.

    ``Maya is a premier application for digital content creation artists, and it is appropriate that Alias|Wavefront demonstrates its support of Linux with the Maya Batch Renderer, as OpenGL adoption of Linux is still maturing within the industry,'' said John Latta, Editor for The Wave Report.

    Availability Information

    Maya Batch Renderer for Red Hat® Linux V6 or above on Intel IA-32 processors is now shipping and can be purchased through Alias|Wavefront or its authorized resellers for $1,295 USD. (International prices will vary outside of the U.S.)

    About Alias|Wavefront

    Alias|Wavefront provides artists with open workflow solutions for creative advantage. As the world's leading innovator of 2D and 3D graphics technology, Alias|Wavefront develops software for the film and video, games, interactive media, industrial design, and visualization markets.

    Alias|Wavefront's film and video customers include Blue Sky, Cinesite, CNN, Digital Domain, Dream Quest Images, Industrial Light & Magic, Pacific Data Images (PDI), Pixar, Sony Pictures Imageworks, The Walt Disney Company, and Warner Feature Animation.

    Games customers include Acclaim Entertainment, Core Design, Electronic Arts, Factor 5, Kodiak Interactive, LucasArts Entertainment Company, Midway Games, Naughty Dog, Nihilistic, Nintendo, Rare Ltd., Retro Studios, Sega, Single Trac, Sony Computer Entertainment, Square, Timeline Studios, Valkyrie Studios, Relic Entertainment and Westwood Studios.

    Alias|Wavefront is a wholly owned, independent software company of SGI® with headquarters in Toronto and technical centers in Seattle and Santa Barbara. Please visit the Alias|Wavefront web site at www.aliaswavefront.com or call 1-800-447-2542 in North America. Readers in Europe can call +800 4125 4125 or 800 791 174 in Italy; +353 1 890 2244 in the Middle East and Africa; 8 1 3 3470 8282 in Asia-Pacific; and 525 203 0030 in Latin America for the nearest sales office or authorized reseller in their area.

    Alias|Wavefront and the Alias|Wavefront logo are trademarks of Alias|Wavefront, a division of Silicon Graphics Limited. Silicon Graphics and IRIX are registered trademarks of Silicon Graphics, Inc. Maya and the Maya logo are trademarks of Silicon Graphics, Inc., exclusively used by Alias|Wavefront, a division of Silicon Graphics Limited. Red Hat is a registered trademark of Red Hat, Inc. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Intel is a registered trademark of Intel Corporation. Windows NT is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corp. All other brands and products referenced are acknowledged to be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. Alias|Wavefront, 210 King Street East, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5A 1J7, Tel: 416-362-9181, FAX: 416-369-6140.

    SOURCE: Alias|Wavefront

  • Re:redhat bribing software companies? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Having worked at A|W in the past I have a pretty good idea why they only mention RedHat. It's purely a testing and support issue. They have enough problems testing against all the NT variants and IRIX variants. Adding all the Linux distros is probably more work than their QA department can handle. They take the easy way out and test against RedHat because it's the "most popular". It also make support easy -- "Are you running RedHat 6.X? No? Sorry can't help you." This is just part of the growing trend of more and more companies "supporting" only the major distros. Linux wins overall but the smaller distros get squeezed out of big companies that look only for the distro name.
  • I'm hoping this might raise some interest at NewTek, who's Lightwave really needs to be ported to Linux. Those who've used the package know how amazing it would be to have this tool running natively under Linux. Even just the renderer would be a worthwhile first step...

    http://www.newtek.com/ [newtek.com] -- write them and let them know you'd BUY a copy!

  • Kinetix (now discreet) would have to rewrite most
    of MAX to get it to linux. its steeped in wintel.
  • I disagree. We use the maya renderer exclusively. It can be used in a profesional environment.
    It may not be the best, but it is not as bad as you make it sound.

    We could export to renderman and other renderers. We don't want to. We would have to hire many shader writers and that makes no sense.

    Unless you can provide more information, don't make hasty judgements.
  • If one is looking to build a render farm, you need to have a rack mount system. This adds price overhead. Also, as I have stressed, memory is important too. For a large chunk of money, again, a premium need to be paid.

    You could do this on a machine cheaper than 3k, but I don't think it can get much cheaper, believe me, I tried. I know that what we looked at and did a price comparison, it came to be about 3k+ a box and that was building it ourselves.

    It might be possible to use a 1k-2k box, but I think that the price/performace ratio favors the 4k boxes. With 2 procs, it is able to do to renders at a time, or when the multi-threaded renderer is ported, it will be 2x faster (in theory.) This reduces the price to 2k per proc, which is closer to your numbers. The frames per minute is important as well. Without access to bench marks (or the ability to report those that I have) it is hard to compare machines and find the optimum price/percormance.

  • I have been using the beta version for a while. Extremely nice. We actualy started ordering a linux render farm before we knew when it was going to be released for linux.
    As with NT, the images will differ slightly due to floats and rounding and all that jazz. The images will be similar enough to mix shots but not individual frames.

    Also, along the SGI and Linux front, I will post a tad of what I had tried to post as a story... no hard feelings here, just infot I thought you all would like to know.

    This is from my review of SGI's Spring Linux University.

    "Linux OpenGL
    The presentation on Linux/OpenGL discussed the opening of OpenGL and the release of IRIS Performer for Linux. The current Mesa [mesa3d.org]/OpenGL hardware
    model was presented, with and without GLX (also opened by SGI). The statement was made that SGI was working with NVIDIA [nvidia.com] on video cards for 3D
    graphics workstation level quality. It was also implied that the card would work with other Intel motherboards as well, but in an SGI Linux system one
    would see an improvement.
    SGI has been working on the direct interface for OpenGL to hardware for a while and has had to go through kernel modules to achieve the results that they
    are looking for. No mention of DRI or XFree86 4.0 [xfree86.org].
    "

    and

    "
    Final Thoughts:

    All in all, this was a good experience and I would suggest it to anybody. I learned about where SGI stood and where they were going with Linux. SGI is
    not taking Linux lightly. We were assured that IRIX for MIPS was going to be continued to at least 2010, but that SGI was going to go into Linux without
    looking back. Several mentions of open sourcing parts of IRIX for Linux were made.
    I would say that SGI might become a Linux powerhouse in the near future and that what they have learned from previous business ventures has not been
    wasted."

    *Note: If anyone is working on migrating their render farm to support both SGI's and Linux boxes, I would love to get in contact with you. We use LSF on both platforms with a heavy perl backbone.
  • A 1k linux machine for rendering will get you no where. I know that you will need at least 3-4K a box. What we are going with are dual procs with 1gb of ram. Still much cheaper than our 18k Octanes.
    With the scenes that we render, we look at at least 500 mb of ram devoted to the render process.
    It is cheaper... and it is a big deal, but still more expensive than you had guessed.
  • Just a guess, but this was done on A|W user's behalf, not because SGI has started suporting linux.
    Trust me, the users have spoken loudly on this... at least those in my studio.
  • I agree with all the above points.
    We have textures in the 100's of mbs.
    Also, the average home machine is no good for this. As I have perviously stated, 500+ mb of ram is desired and even more is better.
    Swapping while rendering sucks.

    I don't see any real studios taking advantage of this, but I do see some home users or maybe, but I am doubtfull, some small shops wanting something like this.

    There are places that allow you to render on their machines, but it does cost a premium. If other studios are as cautious as we are, using a distributed home renderer will never happen. We protect all of our data and would never let it out in the wild.
  • Agreed.
    Some of the SGI Linux OpenGl workstations are slated to release durring the 2nd or 3rd quarter.
    They appear to be using a standard NVIDIA card that will be even more accelerated (if only a bit) in the SGI Linux desktops. I am allready trying to get people where I work as anxious as I am for the new machines to come out.

    The Maya port deadline also seems resonable from what I have heard.

    This is truly a good time for animation studios.
  • Running on the render farm is a big deal.

    Right now the cheapest solution is large numbers of NT machines. Using Linux allows the same hardware to be used, but we get an extra 80-120 Megabytes per machine (approximate memory savings over NT2000 of Linux without X), which when multiplied by the hundred or more machines in the farm is a huge savings! The local disk space may be a savings as well, though the time when we don't have to dual-boot NT is still in the future, sigh...

    Also, being able to rlogin to any farm machine and run tests is a huge win! And not having some monkey whose job is to switch the monitor between each machine and hit the "OK" button on the error messages would also help a good deal...

    Believe me, we need Linux in the render farm much more than on the desktop.

  • not quite, tex
  • I work for a research project in distributed systems, and some of our biggest users are 3D shops, (We're working on turning the entire UW Comp Sci and College of Engineering labs into one massive 1000-node render farm) so I know all about render farms.

    This does not enable a cheap render farm - you've been able to do this with NT for a long time. Yes, it's nice because it's on Linux, so the cost per node is an NT license cheaper, the nodes are more stable, yada yada yada - #include . But it really doesn't suddenly enable real cheap render farms. (Check out Lemon [ice.org])

    People are singing and dancing in the streets because they think this signifies some sort of major effort and commitment to Linux by Alias/Wavefront. It doesn't - if this took more than a few days of an engineer's time then they have a really fucked up renderer. The real show of a commitment to Linux is the creation tools - even just a target date would be something. Until then it's really just hype. (Though granted, nice to hear for render farm admins)

  • Not to mention BMRT, which is Renderman compliant as well. There are other good ones too, like Blender, Radiance, POV-Ray, and Moonlight 3d.

    These are all pretty decent renderers for Linux. Some are more suited to normal consumer use than others.
  • What hardware dose Linux need to support?
    Linux allready has support for 3D cards and hardware 3d rendering...
    I suspect what you should have said is the PC dosn't have support. PC 3D cards are still not as good as you'll find on SGI machines.

    But even if the hardware dose not yet exsist the drivers do.. So it's just a matter of having specs
    for a 3D PC card that can do the job. Someone has to make such a card first :)
  • (Treat this as a question from someone who at best is a tinkerer where rendering is concerned)

    What about POV-Ray? I mean, it's been out there for years and IIRC last year some IBM engineers built a cluster of RH Linux boxes, then set a world record for a specific rendering benchmark.

    How is Maya, KIllustrator, Sketch, etc. different than POV-Ray, etc.? Which I guess devolves into a question as to how ray tracing is/is not different than vector drawing?

  • Focusing on a single distribution makes QA and support a lot easier for them, and Red Hat on Intel gets them the bulk of the existing Linux installs (I figure Mandrake is close enough to be included).

    This is an unfortunate side effect of the differentiation amongst distributions. The software will probably run fine on (for example) Debian/x86, but the cost of testing and supporting such a configuration far outweighs the potential revenue for an ISV. I'm hoping that the LSB will eventually smooth out these differences so that vendors can easily produce software that will run out of the box on any compliant distribution. That doesn't help alternate architectures, but at least it would put Linux on equal footing with Windows.
  • Just wait until SGI starts selling mid-grade Linux workstations. They already have an X server for Nvidia hardware (in-house only for now, but not for long) that is said to blow Octanes out of the water. (Holy hardware T&L, Batman! I believe it!)

    I saw these puppies (arf!) at the Linux show that was here in Sydney, Australia. I didn't get much of a chance to enquire as to what sort of CPUs they have or whatever, but from the little presentation I watched it's all supposed to be 'standard' Intel hardware. I assumed it was some sort of NVidia chipset because the Performer/OpenGL demos they were showing had the little NVidia logo all over them.

    And yeah, it was pretty silky smooth running things like that Performer streetscape, rocket Tux, some hangliding demo, full screen, under X (with Gnome, BTW ;))

    I doubt they'd blow an Octane out of the water for CPU power? Aren't those things fairly hefty.. not sure what they are. I'm sure the graphics card could probably cope with the amount of polys an Octane could throw at it but I doubt an Intel based system could throw the same amount of polys and do whatever physics / fluid dynamics /etc need to be done at the same time?

    I'm just guessing.. I could be wrong :) Leave me alone!

  • My company is about to release a (beta) product for Linux. According to Marketing this is for "RedHat 6.0/6.1". However, I did the entire port myself and I can tell you that there are no RedHat specific things in there. (there are library version issues, though)

    Why do this? Because (according to Marketing) RedHat is the "clear leader" on i386. Plus they are the only ones "Certified on Alpha" (the port will eventually cover Alpha). Of course, you and I know that there's no real appreciable difference among distros (from a server perspective), but these people come from the Tru64 vs AIX vs HP-UX vs Solaris mindset of "If it has a different name, it must be a whole new paradigm."

    On the plus side, since we are a small company I was able to badger the CEO (aka Marketing) into releasing the beta (and maybe the product) as a tarball instead of (maybe in addition to) an rpm. Since I also wrote the first draft of the release notes (gosh we're small!) I mentioned it was for RedHat 6.0/6.1 but then noted that ANY kernel 2.2/glibc 2.1 distro should work.
    --
  • Jesus.

    "George Lucas announces the usage of internet technology to create Star Wars Episodes II & III. Now, millions of geeks can participate by joining the distributed render-farm."

    Imagine. High costs of video production are lowered. Geeks would do this for *free*. However, within a week someone would hack the client and set up a dummy site as a repository for all the completed images, from which everyone in the world would be able to see parts of the movie for free.. can you say "big time spoiler"? I knew you could. I doubt Lucas would ever do something like this (although a lesser studio or independent filmaker *might*. It's worth a look at), mainly because he'd lose some control over the process.
  • I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid so stupid that it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. Your writing has to be a troll. Nothing in our universe can really be this stupid. Perhaps this is some primordial fragment from the original big bang of stupid. Some pure essence of a stupid so uncontaminated by anything else as to be beyond the laws of physics that we know. I'm sorry. I can't go on. This is an epiphany of stupid for me. After this, you may not hear from me again for a while. I don't have enough strength left to deride your ignorant questions and half baked comments about unimportant trivia, or any of the rest of this drivel. Duh.
  • facts are, linux/intel outperforms mips/sgi in the real world by over 2000%. cpus are faster and more scalable, linux scalability and reliability put irix to shame, and all for 1/200th the cost.

    Excuse me, BeigeBoxBoy? You are off by several orders of magnitude. Read about ccNUMA. We all like linux, but try not to get carried away.

  • Am I the only one unable to reach the link?
  • (fundamentalist-mode=ON)

    Why does it seem like every time a commercial piece of software is released for GNU/Linux, it's for "RedHat 6.0 on Intel cpus". I know we had a similar discussion here when codewarrior was first released, but IMHO, it's quite important not to set Linux==RedHat. When people start asking where Linux 6.0 is available, things are getting out of hand.

    Is there actually anything about RedHat that makes it possible (except the rpms, which can be converted to .tgz or whatever) that makes is possible, or even worthwhile to make it distribution-specific?? (Note: this is not flaming, I ask this because I don't know)

  • The IBM people ran the POV-RAY as a benchmark for their cluster.

    With all due respect to the POV-RAY developers, I gotta say that there's still quite a long way until it's up there with the "big boys" (that is, SoftImage, TrueSpace, Maya and LightWave). First of all, POV doesn't have any modeller that is anything as good as those, and it also lacks quite a lot when it comes to shading, especially special effects, like particle systems and such.

    I've never used Sketch or KIllustrator, only Maya, and comparing them is, IMHO, pointless. There are a ton of features of Maya that would be irrelevant to Sketch and vice versa. Examples: what would you do with assigning gravity, magnetism or wind to objects in a vector drawing package.

  • Does not this annoy you when sometimes Esc button in Opera does not work when you desperately need to stop loading a page (or posting something)?
  • the last paragraph had to be:

    So Maya is one of the last of the leaders of 3d animation to join linux bandwagon. It's a little a bit strange that it happened so late considering that SGI (owner of Alias|Wavefront) seems to be so committed to linux.
  • Good point. If you wanna do hard-core 3d on linux now and have $$$ to burn, check out a combo of Houdini [sidefx.com] and PRman [pixar.com]. Of course, you'd be dropping ~$30K just for the software, but you'd have a damn good setup!

    $.02,

    Brian
  • Ummm...what planet are you from? You have *no* room to talk trash about slipping release dates if you're a Soft user. A|W has been doing a major rev of Maya about every 6-8 months since it's come out. When was Sumatra supposed to ship originally? 1997? 1998? I don't remember exactly, but it was supposed to come out before Maya 1.0. Everyone held off switching from Soft to Maya at first, but now they've done it, and IMO Sumatra will be too little, too late.

    -Brian (who has been on the Maya bandwagon since 1.0 in case you can't tell! :P)
  • well, there goes any up moderation I would have gotten...
  • is here [yahoo.com]

  • True.. but I welcome Maya to Linux. I use houndini and find it awkward for character animation. Its fine for FX animation but the workflow is horrid unless you have full time techno whiz programmers on staff that can modify things for us baboon heathen animators.

  • I disagree, and reckon it can be done far cheaper than that. I dont see any valid reason to go for This Year's Model for anything; the price/performance ratio is way out of whack, and your kit is going to be equally out of date in a year. And that 3-4K system you bought early last year? Worth about 1K now.

    I reckon the trade-off on price and performance of an Abit BP6, and two 600Mhz Celeron's against a single 750Mhz PIII is enough for a render node, dont you? Cheaper, more grunt.

  • Noone does the actual rendering on Onyxes.
    The actual rendering is trivially parallelizable on distributed memory systems and that clusters in fact are. Onyxs performance is about heavy-duty *real time* visualization.
    If you get simulation data from a supercomputer and want to view it interactively in a 4-side cave, you need a fast shared memory parrallelism and most important (and what's the real expensive part of an Onyx) four high-end graphics pipelines.
  • Yes! I saw these too at the Linux expo - I played Quake III for a while on one of them. While I was playing, I was so impressed by the speed of the things that I decided to go to setup and have a look at the video driver information.

    Apart from listing just about every GL extension known to man, the thing that stood out was they were using the Quadro. The Quadro, otherwise known as the NV10, is the next generation after the GeForce 256. They are expected to come with 64Mb of ram, with an enormously powerful T&L architecture. Truly something to behold.

    Quadro info links here:

  • I am not trying to troll, but is anyone else sick of hearing about these annoucements for linux software? First of all the software is proprietary. Even though that *may* help linux, I think we can all agree that free alternatives are prefered. Second, this is not freshmeat. Groundbreaking software announcements are cool. But this is just yet another proprietary software port. On a completely unrelated topic, are there any free renderers? Anyone know of any projects to make one?
  • Well as someone who has been testing the Maya renderer on Linux, I can just say NO a dual celeron will not work well or be reliable. The optimal machine for our kind work turned out to be dual 700Mhz PIIIs with 768 MB RAM in a 2U rack mount box. We tested a dual Celeron, dual PIII and a dual PII Xeon (512k cache) and the Maya renderer benchmarks showed the dual 700 to be the best bang for the buck. Besides as someone who builds these kinds of systems for a living. I don't want to use cheap ass parts to build a render farm for any of the companies I work for. If i'm building a cheap render farm for a friends little project in his bedroom or basement. Then yea maybe... Acutally though, MOST of the renders can be done with a rack of Linux boxes. But some renders require things like Origin2000s. We had some renders in one of my previous companies that at up around 3GB of memory! So we ran them on the Origin. But it's nice to see the Maya renderer ported finally. Now you can get all the major renders (Renderman, Mental Ray, Maya) running on Linux. Now all we need is to get Nothing Real to get 'Shake' (Ultimate compositing package) ported. At least the batch version.. Cheers
  • What would really be cool is if we could use this software, in combination with an engine that doles out pieces of work like distributed.net and seti@home. Someone should be able to create a site for submitting works to be rendered, and then distribute the rendering to all of those who may wish to participate in the distributed rendering. The people who are submitting works to be rendered may be short on resources to do the rendering. It'd be like a distributed production!

    This would be really awesome! What does everybody think?

  • I didn't mean for this to be used by rich hollywood production houses. I meant for this to be for producers who may otherwise be limited on resources. For the people who have the talent and the drive to create the movie, but not the resources necessary to render the movie by themselves within their own lifetimes. Besides, whoever said that the participants ever have to know what projects they are working on until AFTER the rendering is done, if ever? If there are several simultaneous projects going on at the same time, then it could be a single frame from any number of the projects.

    By not using it for commercial movie houses, there's little incentive to hack into it. It's kind of like a resource for potential computer animation independent filmmakers.

    It was just a thought. I still think it would be great.

  • When is the next LarryBoy coming out?

  • I like Maya, really I do. I do most of my work in Maya. But I await the day when they give you a choice in renderers. (yes, there is MTOR but IIRC that was only for IRIX)
    The Maya renderer is good for most things but there are areas where it falls short. I'd like to be able to choose my renderer based on what I'm rendering.
    To a certain extent I miss Houdini [sidefx.com]. It let you set up Render OPs for a large variety of renderers (RenderMan, bmrt, Mantra, mental ray, even ones you wrote yourself)
  • batman :p

  • Terrence... you are right.
    I won't waste the space to give the chronological history of the company but in the end, wether anyone realizes or not, Discreet/Kinetix is still owned by Autodesk and the names are just a game of semantix.
  • Wouldn't it be wonderful if this made the wake-up call that Kinetix needs to do the same thing? At $3,000+ per seat MAX is awesome and comes with a network render engine but it is winbased and prone to the winworld of problems. I just wish I could afford to build a decent, affordable render farm. A linux based one could be a lot cheaper than an NT farm and oh so much more reliable....
  • Actually, the Internet Movie Project wants to do just that (with POV-Ray, I think). I'd post a link, but the site is apparently down. Sorry.
  • Should have looked harder before shooting my mouth off. The Internet Movie Project [imp.org]
  • I use a modern SGI Octane at work -
    Output of the hinv command :
    2 225 MHZ IP30 Processors
    CPU: MIPS R10000 Processor Chip Revision: 3.4
    FPU: MIPS R10010 Floating Point Chip Revision: 0.0
    Main memory size: 1024 Mbytes
    Instruction cache size: 32 Kbytes
    Data cache size: 32 Kbytes
    Secondary unified instruction/data cache size: 1 Mbyte
    Integral SCSI controller 0: Version QL1040B (rev. 2), single ended
    Disk drive: unit 1 on SCSI controller 0
    Integral SCSI controller 1: Version QL1040B (rev. 2), single ended
    CDROM: unit 4 on SCSI controller 1
    IOC3 serial port: tty1
    IOC3 serial port: tty2
    Graphics board: ESI
    Integral Fast Ethernet: ef0, version 1, pci 2
    Iris Audio Processor: version RAD revision 12.0, number 1

    The CPU's are fairly slow but it doesn't matter too much as they're very rarely the cause of bottlenecks.
  • Sorry a huge chunk (including the ship) for Titanic was done in Lightwave. The Matrix was done in Maya, I can't vouge for Appolo 13, but it's doubtful it was done in Houdini.

    The funny thing about Houdini is I really hope you like crunching numbers. Houdini is to animation what the old Avid system is to video editing. Done by numbers.

    Besides the ability to throw the batch renderer on damn near any x86 machine laying around, and being able to put it on a machine that can use more of it's power to render than to keep the interface running is another big advantage.

    Lastly it show's one more step towards the ultimate release of Maya for Linux.
  • I've wondered this myself before, and came up with a number of reasons why this would not be a feasible idea.

    First, a reasonable complicated scene file will probably be several megs. Some I've worked with are several hundred. This includes geometry data, textures, scene settings, etc. Not to mention, users would need the executables and plugins for rendering, which can be rather big, too. Since generally all of the data is required for rendering a frame, this would not be possible for people on modems.

    Also, many companies would likely find it a license violation if their rendering code was distributed to random users on the internet. There's the option to create a common file format exportable by MAX/LW/SI/Maya/whatever, which might use its own open source renderer, but some features would be lost in the process.

    Another problem would be security of the data. Since the images are being rendered on a person's computer, he has access to those images Sure, the data can be encrypted, but there's always someone who can hack a client to bypass something like this. He could then claim it as his own, or change it somehow and have the client submit it, or cause other trouble.

    I'm sure most of these problems could be worked around somehow, but I'm also sure there's a number of other problems I've forgotten. All in all, probably not something that will happen anytime soon.

    ---------
    Terrence
  • Isn't it now "Discreet 3D Studio MAX?" I believe Discreet Logic bought Kinetix or something. Somehow, Kinetix changed hands between Autodesk and Discreet, and the latter finally got rid of that dumb name (sounds like a toy company). I know my copy of 3.1 says Discreet on it... --Terrence
  • What you are saying is not entirely true. All the special effects houses use more than just one program for the effects. Lightwave or Houdini for modeling, Softimage for character animation and Renderman for rendering for instance. Movie studios also have the habit to contract different special effects houses for different shots and every special effects house has a favourite program or custom software they use. This results in a mix of 3D software being used in one movie.

  • A UNIX (I can't remember which flavor, soryy) version of the 3D Studio renderer is already available. Contact Kinetix for more info.

  • Yes there is POV-Ray at http://www.povray.org
    There is also "Moonlight studio" which is supposed to become a Softimage clone.

  • While it would be nice to see the whole package on Linux, just having the renderer is still a big deal. Most computer animation studios use a "render farm," which is, basically, a room full of workstations doing all of the rendering gruntwork in parallel. Right now, that's all done with expensive MIPS/Sparc/Alpha-class iron. With Maya's renderer for Linux, building a render farm becomes easier and cheaper, since you can now use cheap, off-the-shelf x86 PC components.

    Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
    Facing down the future coming fast
  • He owes big time on that surfboard.

    --
  • I'm wondering how much this is a product of SGI's recent fixation on linux support, trickling down to A|W, or if this is perhaps the result of those huge petitions to get A|W to port ANYTHING of Maya to linux?

    As for the softi/maya wars, there's a reason Final Fantasy the Movie is being done in Maya...

    *snicker
    (ps i want to work for A|W! They get Aeron chairs!)
    (pps i'd add links but i'm LAZY today)
  • Speaking from a company that does 3D animation for tv and movies, this _is_ a big deal. Have you looked at the cost comparison of MIPS vs x86? Given the option to render on a from of MIPS/IRIX machines, x86/NT machines and x86/Linux machines, the choice seems nearly obvious that x86/Linux (or even x86/FreeBSD, Maya batch render allowing) is preferred, based on a price/performance ratio.

    --Mishka
  • "no problem"? um, unless:

    you're using linux/ppc. or linux/alpha. or linux/dreamcast or linux running on some processor i made in my basement using technology i recovered from a crashed alien spacecraft. or linux on any other non-intel processor.

    can't exactly convert one type of machine code to another, now can you? so if you wind up on a non-intel platform and are handed an intel .rpm, even if you have rpm installed you can't do much of anything with it.

    you could just say that software companies shouldn't be expected to go to the bother of supporting/coding for alternative platforms. i say that's a horrible way to look at it. whether the platform is widely used is a non-issue; even if the platform has no users, that shouldn't matter. one of linux's greatest strengths (OK, one of GNU's greatest strengths) is its cross-platform functionality.. once you have the kernel and gcc and hardware drivers ported, any linux program will go over perfectly fine. So linux erases hardware boundaries; makes the hardsware aspects irrelivant. Which is how things should be. If you ship for one platform only, and make hardware relevant in the least, you are breaking something fundamental about what makes linux powerful.

    There _are_ ways around it; they _could_ just compile for all conceivable platforms, and then refuse to test the compiled rpms or verify they work. Would be better than nothing, anyway..
    and of course they could just do something where the source is available to any user, but not open; that is, give the user no rights to distribute, reuse, or do anything else with the code beyond tweak and compile it.. but of course then we'd have all kinds of flames against them, because for some reason people are angered by restrictively liscensed source code more than unavailable source code. and they would probably refuse to do it anyway. i think there is something of a problem here.
  • Just wait until SGI starts selling mid-grade Linux workstations. They already have an X server for Nvidia hardware (in-house only for now, but not for long) that is said to blow Octanes out of the water. (Holy hardware T&L, Batman! I believe it!)

    No timetables have been released, but I'd expect they'd have the line of workstations and the Oh-My-God-That's-Fast Nvidia drivers out by sometime this summer. At that rate, we can probably expect a port of Studio/Maya announced-- if not completed-- by the end of this year.

    Indeed, with Linux, the question is never if, but when };-)
  • The other important point for commercial companies is ease of support. They don't want their technical helpline clogged with people calling because their software doesn't work on some obscure distribution, so it makes it simpler for them to say "we support this on RH 6.1 only" - chances are it'll work on other distros in the Linux world, but they don't want to be bogged down and legally obliged by their support contract to make sure it supports every little thing, and they don't want to be solving problems caused not by their program, but by some random mini-distro's braindead setup.

    Remember, many of these companies are coming over from the Windows world -where the OSes (wince, win98-on-dos, wnt) microsoft would have you believe are similar are actually very, very different (apart from the GUI look-and-feel).

  • I was just wondering this the other day - are there any commercial quality open source 3D animation packages in development at this time? I haven't really ever heard anyone talking about this.

    I'd also be interested in hearing about just any free alternatives too.


    Hotnutz.com [hotnutz.com] - Funny

  • It probably could be called Maya Unlimited (text mode edition).

    Assuming that this package is equivalent to batch rendering on the SGI platform, this appears to be a semi-complete port of the full Maya package. While Renderman and MentalRay have been available on the Linux platform for some time, there is a big difference between how these work and how Maya Batch Render works.

    I'm assuming that Maya Batch Render for Linux works the same way as IRIX. I only use Maya on Onyx2 and O2 hardware, so I may be wrong about this....

    First of all, Renderman and MentalRay are essentially stand-alone programs that read in a generic scene geometry/lighting/shader information for each frame. They do not know how to animate a scene on their own. Neither package is necessarily tied to a particular modeler. MentalRay is available for Softimage and 3DMax, and Renderman can work with numerous modeling apps.

    Maya Batch Rendering, on the other hand, is very modeler specific. In fact, it _IS_ the modeler. Let me explain;

    Part of the elegance of Maya is the fact that much of it is implemented in the MEL scripting language and is open architecture. You can change almost any behavior of the program at run-time merely by editing the scripting code. (think Emacs!)

    In addition, every action the user takes within Maya is interpreted as a piece of MEL code. When you save a scene in Maya, it is saving a MEL script that includes all the discrete steps to rebuild the scene, such as creating primitives, deforming objects, setting up dynamics simulations, storing key information, motion paths, creating shader networks, etc.

    The Maya Batch Renderer is essentially a non-interactive version of Maya. It executes a file containing MEL scripting commands roughly equivalent to GUI operations to build up a scene internally, then renders a set of frames calculating any (non-precached) animation data along the way.

    Incidentally, Renderman and Mentalray are generally considered superior to Maya's rendering facility. A lot of high-end CGI work is only modeled and animated in Maya, but rendered in Renderman. Paint Effects in Maya 2.5 can do quite a few things that no other rendering package can even approach, however.

    By the way, Lightflow [lightflowtech.com] is another renderer that is currently available for Linux that produces some amazing images, albeit very slowly. There is a Maya interface being developed for this package so it looks promising.

  • You're right - it's not a big deal. At least not for the average Linux user. But for companies who produce computer graphics for TV and/or film, the prospect of low-cost render farms is probably the greatest deal they've ever had. So don't knock it.

    HH


    Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
  • is here [yahoo.com]
  • We are among the customers that Alias|Wavefront mention as wanting a Linux version of the Maya renderer. But the reason we want it is slightly different: we want a Linux version so that we can run it on our FreeBSD boxes with Linux emulation. We'd love to ask for a FreeBSD version but that would probably fall on deaf ears right now. We already use Renderman under FreeBSD where it works very nicely (we in fact used Renderman under FreeBSD for much of The Matrix). We find that under heavy stress (eg. rendering images at 6k for IMAX using multiple textures at a similar resolution) FreeBSD performs better than any other operating system. -- Dan (aka SIGFPE), Manex Visual Effects
  • I'm wondering if anyone has seen LinuxArtist.org [linuxartist.org]. There are actually plenty on quality ray tracers and 3D environments all ready available for Linux. A|W is just adding Maya to the list. This should have been done a long time ago, in my opinion.

    Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of Alias|wavefront. Alias|wavefront and Maya are registered trademarks of Alias|wavefront, a wholly owned subsidiary of SGI®.
  • Keep in mind that Linux is a kernel, not a complete operating system (where operating system = kernel + libraries + utilities). RedHat is the most popular and most-widely available distribution, and i86 is (unfortunately) the most common architecture, so "RedHat 6.0 for intel" becomes a "standard" for people who don't know better or don't want to devote time to testing/compiling for every distribution, libc, etc.

  • It's just the renderer... (Score:3)

    by epaulson ( 7983 ) on Monday March 13, 2000 @09:15AM (#1205968) Homepage
    This isn't really that big of a deal, because it's just the renderer - you still need an NT or IRIX box to actually create any content. When they port all of their tools over, then it will be a big deal. (The maya renderer is a command-line tool, and if it was any big deal to port then I'd be really suprised.)

  • Re:redhat bribing software companies? (Score:3)

    by Mullen ( 14656 ) on Monday March 13, 2000 @09:43AM (#1205969)
    Well, if you can't convert RPM's to what ever you use, then you should be running Redhat. I have Slackware 7 installed, but it is Redhat 6.0 compatable. All I have to do is convert the RPM's to tar.gz and install. No problem.

  • Re:redhat bribing software companies? (Score:3)

    by tweek ( 18111 ) on Monday March 13, 2000 @09:30AM (#1205970) Homepage Journal
    I think the reason you see Redhat 6.0 on Intel is because of 2 things:

    1) Redhat (weather you like it or not) is the name of linux right now. I know it isn't right but these are suits who write these things. This leads into the second point
    2) Least common denominator. Redhat 6.0 was the first libc6 distro if I'm not mistaken. I think all of the other major distros have migrated as well.

    Since Redhat was the first name in linux to market, they create on that base. Thus RPM format. Experienced linux users will know to grab alien and convert the RPMs and what not. People who don't know are probably using Madrake or Redhat. (not a negative slam against redhat by any means. I happen to be a redhat user).


  • just the renderer?

    that's nothing -- side effects software has ported
    their whole high-end 3D animation software package to Linux almost a year ago (they were the first), and they're ahead of maya for the big film production houses (they use houdini for: titanic, the matrix, appolo 13, etc.)

    also, maya is a bit behind in Procedural technology. side effect's Houdini not only has got the procedural geometry, but also procedural motion and sound editing. check out:

    http://www.sidefx.com/product/index.html

    john.

  • Re:It's just the renderer... (Score:3)

    by WhyteRabbyt ( 85754 ) on Monday March 13, 2000 @10:15AM (#1205972) Homepage

    This isn't really that big of a deal, because it's just the renderer - you still need an NT or IRIX box to actually create any content.

    Actually it is; if you're doing serious work, then cheap render nodes are incredibly nice to have. And at the moment, on horsepower-per-buck, it looks like NT systems do damn well; we have a coupla student using Maya at home who reckon that they're getting better speeds of a 2K NT box than our 30K SGI Octanes. Even if thats not true, if you're talking about 1K to 1.5K for a Linux render node and you're talking cheap.

    When they port all of their tools over, then it will be a big deal. (The maya renderer is a command-line tool, and if it was any big deal to port then I'd be really suprised.)

    The fact that it may have been easy to port isn't the issue; its the fact that they did it that is.

  • Re:It's just the renderer... (Score:4)

    by hkon ( 46756 ) on Monday March 13, 2000 @09:25AM (#1205973) Homepage
    Yes, it's just the renderer, and yes, that's a big deal because the machines that is used for the content-creation are most likely SGI, Intergraph or the like, and Linux doesn't have support for that kind of hardware anyway. At least, not yet. With this software, Content creators can use one machine with $OPERATING_SYSTEM on it and several hundred (assuming he can afford) machines running Linux doing the actual rendering, which is the time-consuming and expensive part of 3D-creation. Throw out the SGI Onyx, replace it with 200 Athlons running Linux, and you have an open, more flexible, and quite possibly cheaper and faster (i won't speculate) rendering engine.

  • Softimage was there for a long time (Score:4)

    by Ainis ( 52941 ) on Monday March 13, 2000 @09:59AM (#1205974)
    No big deal.

    Softimage [softimage.com] uses a very cool renderer called mental ray [mentalimages.com] and it has been available for linux for a long time.

    Also Pixar's Renderman [pixar.com] (used in Toy Story) is also available for linux.

    So Maya's softimage is one of the last of the leaders of 3d animation to join linux bandwagon. It's a little a bit strange that it happened so late considering that SGI (owner of Alias|Wavefront) seems to be so committed to linux.

  • ray tracing (Score:5)

    by gnarphlager ( 62988 ) on Monday March 13, 2000 @09:26AM (#1205975) Homepage
    who is Ray and why would we want to selectively trace him?

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