Question. What do Shrek, Dreamworks, Avatar and Sinbad have in common?

Linux.

Yes, since the turn of the century Linux has featured heavily in the production process of mainstream animated films, and in the special effects arena.

Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas was the first hollywood production created entirely on Linux. While the original Shrek used Linux entirely for the rendering process, in Sinbad, the animaters worked directly on 250 Linux workstations.

Not a Traditional Role

While having a Linux render farm may not seem that odd, having the animators use Linux workstations is certainly surprising.

Unix, the precursor to Linux, has been used in Hollywood render farms for years. The 80′s iconoclassic Tron used Unix render farms to bring the special effects to life.

Having Linux on servers is not strange – most of the worlds web and application servers run Linux – so having a Linux render farm is not out of the ordinary. It does much deeper than that though.

Today Linux is used in everything from the design process right through to the rendering and printing on film of the end product.

Right now, designers are using a wide array of Linux based operating systems to bring us world class special effects. Desktops running anything from the completely free Ubuntu to the proprietary Red Hat Linux can be seen in offices of the big hitters in the entertainment industry.

Avatar used an entirely Ubuntu driven render farm to deliver each crisp image, for instance.

More than the Operating System

It is one thing to have your people use a Linux based operating system, what about the tools they use? Things like designing characters to actually building the three dimensional models and scenes require sophisticated software.

A lot of the three dimensional work used to be done using Maya. Maya is a 3D modeling and rendering suite. It is mainly Windows based, but can be built for Mac OS. There are known issues with Maya on Mac though.

Maya is also rather expensive, precluding the adoption by smaller studios and private users.

Enter Blender. Blender is free, and very powerful. Blender is also a rendering suite capable of rendering in many formats. The strength of blender is that it is not platform specific. You can have blender on anything from Windows to Solaris or Mac. That means that even if your designers work on Mac, your servers will be rendering the scenes they create using the same toolset.

Similar alternatives to many popular proprietary products exist as well.

Low Cost of Entry

The cost of entry when using Linux and other open source software for rendering is very low. Let us break down a typical Open Source software suite that would be used for basic 3D modeling:

Operating system: Ubuntu (Used on servers for Avatar) – Free.

Graphics Design Suite: GIMP. (Similar use to Photoshop) – Free.

3D Modeling and Rendering: Blender (Used on Spiderman 2 and by History Channel) – Free

Dreamworks cited the low cost of using Open Source software when they were able to open a fourth graphics pipeline to extend their studio capabilities. They were also able to use Linux based machines to temporarily extend their capabilities as needed. They called this expendable animation.

Extendability

Some graphics studios also use the open source tools as platforms to build their own customised toolsets on. GIMP is very popular for this, and the GIMPA Animation Package is a good example.

Studios often write python or other programs to do certain automated tasks with the open source tools they use. Both GIMP and Blender are modular in design, and plugins can be built to do certain tasks like exporting to a certain format, for instance.

Conclusion

There used to be an advertising campaign that proclaimed “Linux is everywhere.” With the very public adoption of Linux by large companies this is certainly becoming a reality. Amazon.com reported a 25% saving in the first year after moving their infrastructure to Linux in 2001, and that saving is ongoing. They also use Ubuntu for their cloud services today.

When taking into account the immediate savings associated with using Linux and certain Free Open Source tools as well as the long term savings year on year, there is little surprise when another large project uses Linux in various steps of production. From the desktop to the server, Linux is here to stay.