The machines which make the movies (was Re: [TriLUG] Deploying Linux to...Aunt Marge)

[Rick DeNatale]

On 2/27/06, Greg Brown <gwbrown1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > The day might well come when Apple, having completed the takeover of
> > Disney, just gives up and sells their PC manufacturing business to an
> > Asian company.
> >
> > I hope not, but...
> > --
> > Rick DeNatale
>
>
>
> Yeah, I hope not too.   But I think they would still want control of the
> platform used to create the graphic arts used to create the movies that
> pulls the Apple train along.

I don't think that Macs actually figure all that much in to creating
CGI. Scripts, storyboards yes, maybe some post-production.

>From what I've read Pixar uses Macs only for workflow, and only
recently implemented the ability to view their work on OS X.  The
heavy lifting gets done on Linux server farms.

ILMs legacy comes from the early-mid 1980s, about the same time the
Mac as a cute little 128K box, and Silicon Graphics was the king of
high end graphics rendering.  They were funded by George Lucas as part
of ILM, until he decided he wanted to unload the division. I just
happened to be in the Pixar booth at Siggraph around 1984 with Bill
Beausoleil who was one of IBMs top graphics guys at the time, when one
of the pixar guys asked him if IBM might be interested in buying them.
Back then they were much more of a technology group than movie makers.

One of the big things that got Pixar and it's renderman software to
it's position was pixar's invention of digital compositing using an
additional alpha plane.  Although that is supported widely now, back
then it was cutting edge stuff, which was IIRC revealed to the world
as a Siggraph paper that same year.

In any event, a year or so ago, pixar started transitioning from SGI
hardware to Intel/Linux boxes.

Googling on pixar linux turns up some interesting stuff.
--
Rick DeNatale

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