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> its a cool Visual FX studio not a technology company..

Weta develops metric tones of tech internally, including employing some of the top graphics researchers at various points in their careers. There is tons of tech talent in VFX and animation shops. Hell, I work with libraries open sourced by Pixar as part of my day job at a FAANG.


Weta does also run their own datacenter for local rendering; they use some network automation stuff I put together to run some of the DC switching side of things. They have internally developed render farm scheduling systems, lots of hardware competence and run up against hardware bottlenecks they solve in innovative ways. Unity could see render speed increases, better pipelines and other useful libraries included that will improve the development experience for unity games.


> There are plenty FAANG engineers minted from the top Midwestern schools - think CMU and other state schools - even if they rank behind the top schools on the coasts.

CMU is a private school, ranked number 1 in CS, and is not in a Midwestern state! That said, there are lots of top CS programs in the Midwest.


CMU is on the wrong side of the Appalachian mountains to best East Coast. Pittsburg has much more in common with neighboring Ohio than it does with Philadelphia. Its regularly included in the Rust Belt which is a subset of the Midwest.


It’s certainly not East Coast, but it’s very North East - the rust belt spans well beyond the Midwest. Even culturally Pittsburgh feels like it has more in common with, say, Buffalo or other North Eastern rust belt cities than Wisconsin or Minnesota.


Exactly. I think Pittsburgh has more in common with non-NYC New York than with Ohio. It feels much more like a non-Boston/NYC Northeastern city than like e.g. Columbus or Indianapolis.


I'm from Pittsburgh, my partner is from New Jersey. We argue about this (in a playful way) all the time; Pittsburgh is east coast, to me. Ohio is midwest. She counters with "a seven hour drive to the water is not on the coast."


I used to follow your Rust work and had no idea you are yinzer! Mineo’s or Aiello’s? :)


Fun fact: Carol, my co-author on the Rust book, is too, and still lives there!

I worked for Pizza Outlet/Vocelli's for seven years, so, I have some bias, haha! One of the locations I was at competed with Mineo's, so... not saying that Vocelli's is the best, but it has a special place in my heart anyway.


It's Pittsburgh, not Pittsburg.

The "is Pittsburgh midwestern?" debate is irrelevant since the article does not mention Pennsylvania. Also, increasing tech hiring by 100% in Pennsylvania would be really hard since the state also has Philadelphia and because Pittsburgh's tech scene has been strong for years.


Granting that there is a lot of fuzziness in all of these definitions, Buffalo and even Rochester can be included in "Rust Belt" but are not Midwestern.


Yeah, I meant to say CMU is a private school unlike the other leading Midwestern schools which are generally public. Pittsburgh is pretty far from the east coast, so it being in Pennsylvania doesn't really make it a 'coastal school' in my eyes, so I'll continue to lump it in with its geographic neighbors, though perhaps 'Rust belt' region is more accurate than Midwest for what I'm trying to b describe.

What ranking puts CMU at 1 in CS? Just curious because I usually see it behind a couple coastal schools.


It’s currently tied for 1 with their other usual suspects in US News [1]. Of course these rankings are all a bit arbitrary, game-able, and should be taken skeptically :)

[1] https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-science-sch...


Thank you for the link! Ah yes graduate education makes a lot of sense, CMU's computational linguistics department publishes incredible stuff and of course their ML stuff is the cutting edge, too.


It's in Pittsburg which is a Midwestern city. Even if the state has some coast.


University of Illinois Urbana Champagne, University of Michigan, university of Wisconsin Madison, and Purdue are all top 20 in CS.


Very cool! Just the other day I was trying to set Blender’s camera based on a standard 3x4 computer vision KRT matrix, and it is surprisingly a pain in the ass —- I wish more of these graphics CAD packages (Blender, Houdini, Maya) made it easier to deal with vision data.


I agree, these tools should have an official computer vision module since so many people are using synthetic data these days.


> Autodesk tools (especially Maya) are way too expensive in what they deliver. I'm glad many big studios realized this in that they either build their own tools (Pixar/Dreamworks) or they adapt Open Source (Blender) and help improving it.

Cost isn’t the issue, it’s mainly the fact that Autodesk effectively put Maya on life support. Pixar is paying hundreds of software engineers in the Bay to develop their proprietary animation tools, which is most definitely not cheaper than a few hundred Maya seats per show.


This is a gross misunderstanding of everything in the industry.

Maya is far, far from being on life support. There are hundreds of studios around the world that use it, and autodesk do substantial development in Maya till date including updated adding USD, Bifrost and parallel graph evaluation.

The fact that Pixar have their own animation package (Presto) has nothing to do with Maya whatsoever.

The first ancestor to Presto effectively predates Maya. They've developed a lot of custom tooling and workflows around it for animation. They still use Maya for many aspects outside animation like modelling etc...

Similarly DreamWorks and rhythm and hues also had their own proprietary animation software (premo and voodoo) for similar reasons but still use Maya for other purposes.

Your comment is completely off base.


Autodesk laid off the entire R&D staff of Maya (outside of Bifrost, which was an acquisition a few years ago and is now a one person show, mainly) and transferred ownership to their maintenance engineering division, if that isn’t life support I don’t know what is.


Funny how they're actively hiring Maya developers now then right?

This is clearly some made up FUD


I think saying it's far from being on life support is really pushing it...

Maya's USD support so far is effectively just Animal Logic's open source stuff bundled with Maya, Bifrost is indeed the one place they're actually still doing development (as they still have that R&D team), Parallel graph evaluation in 2019 and 2020 are really just riding the coattails of work they did a few years ago. Improvements to rendering infrastructure (Arnold) are orthogonal as far as I'm concerned as it's done by the SolidAngle team they acquired a few year ago.

They're effective keeping it running (moving to newer Qt versions and the future Python 3 version for VFX platforms in line with other DCCs) as far as many people are concerned, which at a stretch could be construed as "on life support".


> Cost isn’t the issue, it’s mainly the fact that Autodesk effectively put Maya on life support.

Maya isn't on life support, it's simply that so many studios augment Maya with their own tools & pipeline that it's not necessary for Autodesk to update it with the same frequency that Alias did. It's effectively an OS for 3D content creation for some of the larger shops.


An interesting point of view, which entails an important question: in which ways is Maya superior to Blender in such a platform role? Is Blender going to catch up?

If Maya is only adopted because of habits and ongoing projects, investment in training and customization, and network effects it has no future.


If Maya is on life support, then is 3ds Max the only actual product Autodesk intend to develop?


Autodesk is doubling down on CAD and engineering (their leadership has even said so publicly) — VFX and animation is just a much smaller market. I personally think this is very short sighted.


If it allows blender a foothold, I’m for it.


Don't listen to the person you replied to. They're completely full of it.


Pixar have always developed and used their own in-house animation tools, it's a big part of their culture. I seriously doubt they'd be using Maya (or anything else) regardless of how advanced it was.


Maya is indeed used at Pixar, as is just about every other package out there. Their pipeline is set up to allow work to be done in a variety of tools.


Maya is still used in Pixar’s characters department for modeling, I believe, and maybe a few shading-related (UV layout?) tasks here or there.


You'll find it anywhere someone wants to use it. Some effects people still love doing quick simulations with nCloth, for example.


Very cool! Glad to see Nucleus still getting some love, Jos would be happy — I was talking to a Pixar effects fellow at SIGGRAPH and was under the impression that Houdini’s constraint solver thing had spread like wildfire in that department.


> I was interested to find out which steel mill, since they are almost non-existent in Pittsburgh these days

As evidenced by the smell of sulphur yesterday morning the coke plants down in Clairton are still alive and well!


Film 3D is mostly Linux at this point. All the major VFX shops (like Weta) and animation studios (Disney, Pixar, etc) are on Linux for artist workstations. Apple stuff gets lots of use, but mainly iPads for story boarding and such.


Indeed, many bigger VFX companies are on Linux. However, smaller shops are mainly powered by Windows (or at least that's the case here in Finland). Building your production pipeline on Linux is something that not everyone is capable of doing and in many cases not even worth the r&d costs.


I always wondered what do the replace photoshop with on Linux, haven’t worked in the industry yet.


I've tried for ages (since 2010...) to get the VFX studios to work with me on making Krita good enough for their needs. I've visited dneg, worked with Intel and other parties, but in the end, the studios yell they want to get rid of the shared windows/photoshop pc in the corner office -- but don't want to put in any actual effort. In the meantime, we're getting there anyway.


my single experience with Krita is trying to load hdr raw images in it where it failed with no major error


I imagine in bigger VFX companies the texture artists use Windows or Mac and produce the assets for the 3D guys which use Linux.


Foundry's Mari [1] is pretty heavily used in bigger VFX houses for texturing and it is also available for Linux. Likewise, Allegorithmic's (now owned by Adobe) Substance is available for Linux [2].

1. https://www.foundry.com/products/mari/requirements

2. https://www.substance3d.com/products/tech-specs


Pixar seems to love the new Mac Pro and metal: This new machine clearly shows Apple is delivering on the needs of professionals at high-end production facilities like Pixar.” https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/06/pro-app-developers-re...


I don't know who here is actively using or developing on the platform with that machine. If we had one here I'd be surprised. All that quote shows is that they are investing in Metal for Hydra so that other platform DCCs don't have to limit macOS usage for their integrations. Apple support wouldn't have any impact on our productions.

It is true that we have Mac systems here, that's no secret. But all 'real' film production work is completely Linux based with a completely custom infrastructure.

Source: Currently at Pixar


Pixar are a bit of an Apple offshoot in the first place though. They are very likely to get Apple kit substantially cheaper than most.

"Steve wasn’t capable of being friends. That wasn’t his personality. Besides the Apple stuff, I had a lot to do with his Pixar thing. I was contacted by the people who became Pixar–I knew them well, and they wanted to get out of Lucasfilm. They called me up and asked me for advice, and so I said, I can talk to Steve. I explained very carefully to him who these people were, and you shouldn’t fuck around with them, like he did with his normal employees. He did a good job with them. [Pixar] was the most honest billion he ever made, because he put a lot of his own personal money into nurturing those guys. They got fabulous. That was Steve’s best hour."

Alan Kay - https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-ab...


Pixar have historically been linked with Apple, though. I wonder if they're currently using the current 'trashcan' Mac Pro, which I imagine would be quite limiting.


"been linked" understates it a bit tbh.

> Pixar began in 1979 as the Graphics Group, part of the Lucasfilm computer division, before its spin-out as a corporation in 1986, with funding by Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs, who became the majority shareholder.


I don’t think Pixar’s Maya-like software ‘man v’ runs on macOS, at least it didn’t a couple of years ago (my ex was a TD at Pixar and used to complain about the old version of Linux they were on). I’m pretty sure the demos they showed were of their file format viewer which is a separate thing.


This is Apple marketing spiel. They probably got those testimonials after demoing some new products to executives for a day and then asking for a paragraph to put on a website.

(Also almost every single one of those is from a CEO or VP, not someone who's job it is to actually use these things.)


What software suites are these companies using? I know some of these huge companies have their own in-house stuff but are the big commercial modelling products supporting linux now? I wasn't aware there were really options aside from blender. Also kind of surprises me that artists would be happy on a platform where you can't fire up Photoshop to muck around with a texture map.


Houdini, Maya, Nuke -- all the really big names are on Linux and have been there for a decade or more.


I've heard Pixar uses RenderMan extensively, which I think uses Linux as its primary platform.


Pixar develops and sells RenderMan. The engine itself support Linux as the primary use case, but also Windows and macOS. They all support the same feature-set with the exception of Optix on macOS.


Back when I was doing a lot of 3D and other work that required Photoshop, I used a VM in Linux to make that work. This was back in 2008-2009 though, so I'm not sure if others do that anymore or just use a different PC, other software, etc.


> Curious if this is my bubble or consistent.

Depends where you live! I’m in Pittsburgh and there is still a culture here of bailing to the well heeled suburbs (cough cough Fox Chapel) when having kids. You couldn’t pay me to leave the city core, but the Midwest still clings to that suburban status symbol life more than the rest of the nation.


> but the Midwest still clings to that suburban status symbol life more than the rest of the nation.

I can't speak for all of the Midwest, but to add an anecdatum: I live in a suburb of Minneapolis/St. Paul. As (relatively) nice as those downtowns both are they are both still far noisier, dirtier, and more expensive to live in than the suburb I'm in; further, I look out at wildlife daily at my backyard that extends 1.5 acres, which I find quite pleasant. "Status symbol" has nothing to do with it.


> I don't want to be that kind of stuck-in-the-mud, so I'm trying to just relax and accept linguistic progress in whatever form it takes.

Does this mean you will be dropping the 'u' from colour?


I love these types of breakdowns! It would be really cool to see breakdowns in other portions of a game engine, too: physics, character animation, managing the massive assets, lots of potential goodies.


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