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That’s neat. Does anyone know why they are targeting a 3D animation workload, specifically? Is there software for rendering ran on Linux machines that’s used in

That’s neat. Does anyone know why they are targeting a 3D animation workload, specifically? Is there software for rendering ran on Linux machines that’s used in industry?

delfinom 7y ago
DaVinci Resolve may be one use case. It's profesionally used video editing up to 8K footage and has free versions that run on Linux. It is actually pretty damn resource intensive when you are "rendering" the final version of a video with all your modifications.
leetrout 7y ago
We were not using any linux tooling in our VR pipeline last year (no longer working there). They've had a sales line geared toward VR and high end 3D for a few years now. Lenovo is involved in the Oculus Quest, too... it's how the headband is the same as the Play Station VR headset.
Zhyl 7y ago
Blender has recently seen Animation studios switching to it. It's recently seen a large amount of investment from Epic and a few others and one of the recent releases (2.8) made a lot of interface improvements that brought it in line with other industry tools. https://www.blender.org/user-stories/japanese-anime-studio-khara-moving-to-blender/ https://www.blender.org/user-stories/japanese-anime-studio-k... https://blender.community/c/today/2gdbbc/ https://blender.community/c/today/2gdbbc/ https://www.blender.org/press/epic-games-supports-blender-foundation-with-1-2-million-epic-megagrant/ https://www.blender.org/press/epic-games-supports-blender-fo...
loudmax 7y ago
I wonder if this isn't in response to a single large customer. Maybe some film studio has ordered a large number of these and they want official support for the OS of their choice. Since Lenovo is already supporting this configuration for one particular customer, it's relatively easy for them to offer support to anyone else who wants to run the same platform.
- mindcrime 7y ago
  FWIW, I was a Lenovo employee up until a couple of months ago, and while I didn't work in that division specifically, you hear rumblings. And there is definitely a sentiment among many within Lenovo that wants to push Linux harder, in order to get out from under Microsoft's thumb. It's a delicate dance though, as Lenovo (like all PC OEM's at the moment) is so dependent on MS. And I don't know if this sentiment goes as high as the CEO or not, but I do know that it goes pretty damn high up the corporate hierarchy.
  - xur17 7y ago
    I would love for them to do this. Definitely pisses me off everytime I go to buy a new pc, and have to pay for a Windows license that I immediately wipe from the machine. Any reason they got rid of the blank disk option?
    - mindcrime 7y ago
      I'm not sure. Those decisions were made fairly far from my group. :-(
thdrdt 7y ago
Linux is very 'tweakable' so it is used a lot for custom software and custom pipelines. A lot of software can be run on almost all operating systems. Including software that is used by the industry, like Houdini, Blender, Unity, CryEngine, Unreal Engine. And so on. So yeah, Linux is used a lot in the 3D industry. But my guess is that when it comes to CAD/CAM Windows is still leading.
- qchris 7y ago
  I think that's very much true in terms of engineering CAD/CAM. As far as I know (and I check back fairly often), none of the major CAD packages in Solidworks, Autodesk Inventor, CATIA or Creo work on Linux. The only local Linux CAD project I know of (if you exclude some of the browser-based ones) that's remotely comparable in terms of general 3D parametric design is the open-source FreeCAD, which has come a long way, but doesn't even support things like ordinate dimensions in drawings or have an official governing body for development. I been at companies with plenty of developers running Linux on their primary machine, but have never seen that be the case for someone doing engineering 3D design. Obviously that's just my anecdotal experience, but it seems to line up well with what I know about the situation across the industry as well. It seems like a bit of a shame- with some of the RISC-V chips coming out, and tools like KiCad, one could conceivably put together an entire hardware development toolchain from low/no-cost open-source components, but the tooling around mechanical build processes more or less requires buying seat licenses for it at the moment.
  - HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
    Yeah, I'm going to be stuck doing CAD on a Windows machine for a good long while. Once you get used to the power of the programs, it becomes really hard to go down to something less powerful- and going from SolidWorks or Autodesk Inventor to FreeCAD is like that- there's a noticeable drop in usability and versatility that might be okay for an amateur, but not as a professional.
lvncelot 7y ago
Houdini for instance runs on Linux machines
mroche 7y ago
The backbone of Anim/VFX is built on Linux. However, the majority of these places are running RHEL/CentOS. Adding that text is just standard marketing for the layman to know that the system is ready for graphics workloads, be it VFX or CAD. For your second question: Nuke, Mari, Katana, Maya, Houdini, Substance, Clarisse, Fusion and Resolve (less used), RenderMan, Arnold, VRay, Redshift, Octane, Blender, etc. You’ve also got custom in-house tools and applications, motion capture software, render managers, project management tooling, plugins, etc.
dm319 7y ago
Linux is standard these days for rendering AFAIK. For the actual graphics/modelling part, I think Linux and Windows are often both used. Maya runs on Linux for example.

That’s neat. Does anyone know why they are targeting a 3D animation workload, specifically? Is there software for rendering ran on Linux machines that’s used in industry?

delfinom 7y ago

DaVinci Resolve may be one use case. It's profesionally used video editing up to 8K footage and has free versions that run on Linux. It is actually pretty damn resource intensive when you are "rendering" the final version of a video with all your modifications.

leetrout 7y ago

We were not using any linux tooling in our VR pipeline last year (no longer working there). They've had a sales line geared toward VR and high end 3D for a few years now. Lenovo is involved in the Oculus Quest, too... it's how the headband is the same as the Play Station VR headset.

Zhyl 7y ago

Blender has recently seen Animation studios switching to it. It's recently seen a large amount of investment from Epic and a few others and one of the recent releases (2.8) made a lot of interface improvements that brought it in line with other industry tools. https://www.blender.org/user-stories/japanese-anime-studio-khara-moving-to-blender/ https://www.blender.org/user-stories/japanese-anime-studio-k... https://blender.community/c/today/2gdbbc/ https://blender.community/c/today/2gdbbc/ https://www.blender.org/press/epic-games-supports-blender-foundation-with-1-2-million-epic-megagrant/ https://www.blender.org/press/epic-games-supports-blender-fo...

loudmax 7y ago

I wonder if this isn't in response to a single large customer. Maybe some film studio has ordered a large number of these and they want official support for the OS of their choice. Since Lenovo is already supporting this configuration for one particular customer, it's relatively easy for them to offer support to anyone else who wants to run the same platform.

mindcrime 7y ago
FWIW, I was a Lenovo employee up until a couple of months ago, and while I didn't work in that division specifically, you hear rumblings. And there is definitely a sentiment among many within Lenovo that wants to push Linux harder, in order to get out from under Microsoft's thumb. It's a delicate dance though, as Lenovo (like all PC OEM's at the moment) is so dependent on MS. And I don't know if this sentiment goes as high as the CEO or not, but I do know that it goes pretty damn high up the corporate hierarchy.
- xur17 7y ago
  I would love for them to do this. Definitely pisses me off everytime I go to buy a new pc, and have to pay for a Windows license that I immediately wipe from the machine. Any reason they got rid of the blank disk option?
  - mindcrime 7y ago
    I'm not sure. Those decisions were made fairly far from my group. :-(

thdrdt 7y ago

Linux is very 'tweakable' so it is used a lot for custom software and custom pipelines. A lot of software can be run on almost all operating systems. Including software that is used by the industry, like Houdini, Blender, Unity, CryEngine, Unreal Engine. And so on. So yeah, Linux is used a lot in the 3D industry. But my guess is that when it comes to CAD/CAM Windows is still leading.

qchris 7y ago
I think that's very much true in terms of engineering CAD/CAM. As far as I know (and I check back fairly often), none of the major CAD packages in Solidworks, Autodesk Inventor, CATIA or Creo work on Linux. The only local Linux CAD project I know of (if you exclude some of the browser-based ones) that's remotely comparable in terms of general 3D parametric design is the open-source FreeCAD, which has come a long way, but doesn't even support things like ordinate dimensions in drawings or have an official governing body for development. I been at companies with plenty of developers running Linux on their primary machine, but have never seen that be the case for someone doing engineering 3D design. Obviously that's just my anecdotal experience, but it seems to line up well with what I know about the situation across the industry as well. It seems like a bit of a shame- with some of the RISC-V chips coming out, and tools like KiCad, one could conceivably put together an entire hardware development toolchain from low/no-cost open-source components, but the tooling around mechanical build processes more or less requires buying seat licenses for it at the moment.
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
  Yeah, I'm going to be stuck doing CAD on a Windows machine for a good long while. Once you get used to the power of the programs, it becomes really hard to go down to something less powerful- and going from SolidWorks or Autodesk Inventor to FreeCAD is like that- there's a noticeable drop in usability and versatility that might be okay for an amateur, but not as a professional.

lvncelot 7y ago

Houdini for instance runs on Linux machines

mroche 7y ago

The backbone of Anim/VFX is built on Linux. However, the majority of these places are running RHEL/CentOS. Adding that text is just standard marketing for the layman to know that the system is ready for graphics workloads, be it VFX or CAD. For your second question: Nuke, Mari, Katana, Maya, Houdini, Substance, Clarisse, Fusion and Resolve (less used), RenderMan, Arnold, VRay, Redshift, Octane, Blender, etc. You’ve also got custom in-house tools and applications, motion capture software, render managers, project management tooling, plugins, etc.

dm319 7y ago

Linux is standard these days for rendering AFAIK. For the actual graphics/modelling part, I think Linux and Windows are often both used. Maya runs on Linux for example.