[Editor’s Note: This may be my personal all-time favorite LT
headline… -BKP]
“Linux got its first big Hollywood break in 1997 when Venice,
California studio Digital Domain (D2) used Linux to render the
special effects for the hit movie Titanic. We spoke with D2 while
they were in production using Linux with Star Trek Nemesis, which
has a scheduled release date of December 13, 2002. D2 uses Linux
for both renderfarm servers and artist desktops.“D2 has used Linux for 21 motion pictures, including best visual
effects Academy Award winners Titanic and What Dreams May Come. D2
has won two Scientific and Technical Achievement Academy Awards:
one for Track motion tracking software and the other for the
compositing software NUKE.“Like most studios, D2 was primarily using SGI hardware running
SGI’s IRIX variant of UNIX, both on renderfarm servers and artist
workstations. Experiments at D2 with Dante’s Peak in 1996 proved
that a move to Linux was feasible. ‘The Linux renderfarm came
first,’ notes D2 Digital Production and Technology Creative
Director Judith Crow. ‘With Titanic we were working with a company
called Areté using Renderworld, their ocean-simulation
software. It ran three times faster on our Linux Alphas than on our
IRIX SGI machines.’ While the renderfarm paved the way,
applications such as NUKE and Houdini pushed Linux to the
desktop…”