Maya linux download

Byline: Robin Rowe

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?