OS and Software > All Things Unix > 'Avatar' Movie Made Possible With Linux

'Avatar' Movie Made Possible With Linux

said by Chinmoy Kanjilal :

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Did you all know, Avatar used graphics designed by a four time Academy Award winning visual effects facility based at New Zealand. It has done graphics for X-Men, did it for I Robot and now, it has also done it for Avatar.

To my surprise, the company uses all non-windows software to achieve all these cutting edge graphics. The systems used to render these graphics were all using RHEL as their OS and were all HP Blade server clusters. All these systems are 64 bit and the cluster at Weta Digital is one of the world’s largest Linux clusters. It is ranked #193 amongst the top 500 supercomputers of the world with processing capabilities of 10 Gigaflops.

It is great to know that most of the software used to render these graphics were all Linux software like SoftImage, CompTime, Cine-Paint etc.

Weta Digital has won four Academy Awards and BAFTAs.

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A look at some of the high-density server and networking gear inside the Weta Digital data center used to render the animation for the new James Cameron movie "Avatar."

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Operating System - Linux

Site WETA Digital
System Family - HP Cluster Platform 3000BL
System Model - Cluster Platform 3000 BL 2x220
Computer - Cluster Platform 3000 BL2x220, L54xx 2.5 Ghz, GigE
Vendor - Hewlett-Packard
Application area - Media
Installation Year - 2009
Interconnect - Gigabit Ethernet
Processor - Intel EM64T Xeon L54xx (Harpertown) 2500 MHz (10 GFlops)

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Very cool to read..

But, it only goes to show some of the value of *nix and other FOSS software for commercial application; Scalable, stable, and infinitely configurable to do virtually anything well, and with the minimum time, and resources.

Closed source; Learn the program to achieve what you want.. Open source; Change the program to make what you want (the way you want to make it)

Very cool reading tho.. Thanks!

-Jason
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You can keep the change.

reply to SUMware
The Techie-Buzz article is all about Linux and the data center then ends with a link to a Windows 7 theme?

reply to SUMware
I just got done discussing with several colleagues how Open Source and Linux can make money. I'm going to email them the links to this and see what they say.

reply to adsldude

said by adsldude:

The Techie-Buzz article is all about Linux and the data center then ends with a link to a Windows 7 theme?

reply to SUMware
Didn't see it mentioned but it wasn't RHEL doing this work.

»blog.dustinkirkland.com/2010/01/···ers.html

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It was a great talk, about the type of data center needed to render special effects in today's blockbuster movies. They have a 2 Petabyte disk array, 10gbps networking, and 35,000 cores (4,000+ HP blades) in their data center, and still it takes 48 hours to render some of their graphic sequences.

According to Paul, Ubuntu is at the core of all of this, running on all of the rendering nodes, and 90% of the desktops at Weta Digital. He notes that his farm (he calls it a "render wall") is in fact an Ubuntu Server farm, and not RHEL as he has seen reported in the media.

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reply to SUMware

reply to SUMware
Going to see it again today (6th time) in IMAX 3D.

Linux looks (and sounds) mighty excellently superb!