
How Pixar Solves Problems from the Inside Out - simas
http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/12/how-pixar-solves-problems-from-the-inside-out/
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KaiserPro
Pixar is still battling with lots of legacy cruft. They went through a phase
of hiring the best and brightest directly from MIT and the like.

This resulted in an explosion of tools written in odd ways with obscures
languages each with their own odd DSL to interact with. (Something that most
VFX houses that survived the late 90s/early 00s suffer from.)

Part of the reason that Rhythm and Hues went bankrupt is that they were the
last bastion of "we make all our own tools"

The battle Pixar had to rebuild/replace marionette cost millions and took
years. It got so bad they were seriously considering Maya instead. (I thought
they had actually bitten the bullet and bought a sight license, however it
appears that they wrote presto instead.)

So Pixar isn't the chocolate factory of awesome it used to be. The long hours
and the rampant wage fixing somewhat tarnishes the image.

~~~
panic
_The battle Pixar had to rebuild /replace marionette cost millions and took
years. It got so bad they were seriously considering Maya instead. (I thought
they had actually bitten the bullet and bought a sight license, however it
appears that they wrote presto instead.)_

I'm curious about the details of this. What made marionette so bad that they
couldn't fix it to do what they needed it to do? From my completely naive
perspective, it seems like having custom tools should be a competitive
advantage -- you can tune your tools to the needs of your artists.

~~~
KaiserPro
Please bear in mind this is second hand information (I worked at several VFX
places, and by the nature of the short term contracts people move around
internationally a lot. I also worked at a software vendor (not autodesk, so no
direct interest in replacing marionette))

There were/are two big things that are against you if you develop in house
animation software(or any software for that matter):

1) The training gap. People are most efficient with the software they are used
to. Maya has been the defacto standard in animation for pretty much 7 years
(if not more).

2) the R&D cost. VFX is constantly moving. (Possibly much more than normal web
software) With the increase in CPU/GPU power you are able to do much more.
Take hair for example, In monsters inc, Sulley has something like a million
hairs. (monsters U its 5million +) You need to control that hair system some
how. There are people that groom digital hairs for a living. Its a constant
battle between cheating, simulation and feedback.

The hair system alone could swallow a team of Five for a year, but then you'll
be negleting the other systems that need bug fixes, improvements and R&D
magic.

Having an outside company, who has the resources to have many teams work on
each individual part, along with a UX designer to either make it work more
fluidly(or just put annoying transitions in the way.) and most importantly of
all, a team of QA, bugfixers and Tech support.

You're right, custom tools give you an edge, Take katana from sony: it allowed
an artist to work on an entire city scape (Billions of objects) on a single
computer, in 2006 (it was developed for one of the spiderman films) Something
no other system could do.

Another example is of course renderman.

But these are only the successful ones. Many custom tools are built, atrophy
and die. Sometimes taking the company with them.

But like the rest of IT the march of commoditisation is in VFX as well. Most
software can be bought off the shelf (maya, modo, nuke, Premier, renderman,
arnold) Its also almost possible to render in the cloud (although its
crushingly expensive, and slower.)

------
Maken
Turning arbitrary geometry into light sources is now bleeding edge technology?

~~~
valine
My thought exactly. The open source Blender Cycles had had this for years.

