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Students get used to your pipeline before you hire them. The technology is nothing groundbreaking but the best that is available for free. Most students will ta

Students get used to your pipeline before you hire them. The technology is nothing groundbreaking but the best that is available for free. Most students will take that opportunity.

bombcar 4y ago
This is huge and people underestimate how valuable it can be for a company. DreamWorks Animation's product is not MoonRay, it is movies and they're commodizing their complement. If every animation studio started using MoonRay because of this, they'd have won.
- pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
  Good point in your second sentence, but hard see where you're coming from in the last one. Surely the win for DreamWorks is the competitive advantage of having aspiring creators be familiar with their pipeline. If all animation studios use MoonRay, then that advantage gets erased, and the ultimate impact is null. (The only way this isn't true is if you subscribe to the belief that more MoonRay use → more MoonRay experts → more DreamWorks movies → more profit. That's probably not sound. This probably won't impact how many movies they put out, just how good they look (after benefiting from open source work) and how easy it is to hire for the movies that they put out.)
  - kanzure 4y ago
    > If all animation studios use MoonRay, then that advantage gets erased, and the ultimate impact is null. Other studios could also contribute improvements, which the original studio could benefit from. That's one of my motivations for open-source: I'm selfish and I enjoy the benefits from the efforts of others making my software better, should they find it useful.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      And it would mean that they're all on a level playing field - everyone would be using MoonRay so there wouldn't be an obvious technological advantage. (Note that this could mean that if you thought your software was putting you at an advantage, you might not want to open-source it, but you could also believe that even if it is better, your competitors won't / can't switch to it).
      - com2kid 4y ago
        > And it would mean that they're all on a level playing field - everyone would be using MoonRay so there wouldn't be an obvious technological advantage. But if the improvements to MoonRay drive down production costs for movies, the entire industry wins.
  - XorNot 4y ago
    The estimate would be that their tooling investment is no longer a major competitive advantage, compared to other studios. But, if other studios or new studios switch to their tooling or start using it, then functionally they're subsidizing skilling up animators who they can later hire as contractors or full-time onto their projects. They're in the movie business after all - speed of production saves a lot of money.
Someone 4y ago
Can students realistically run this kind of software on the hardware they have? I would guess DreamWorks only runs it on fairly expensive networks, and would not have prioritized keeping it usable on single-machine setups.
- mkaic 4y ago
  I disagree -- a large part of the lookdev process at animation studios involves single artists working on single workstations with single GPUs while they work on their part of the pipeline. I'd wager that Dreamworks almost certainly does big distributed renders for the final frames of the movie, but a large number of the in-between steps and still-frame test renders probably happen in individual employee's machines -- not to mention that having an engine that can preview the render in near-realtime is a staple of modern 3D pipelines now that we have such beefy graphics cards.
berkut 4y ago
This won't be their entire pipeline though. People will have to use the open source version in vanilla DCCs without all of Dreamworks' integrations, so will only be exposed to a bit of it in terms of configuring the renderer's options.
- ziddoap 4y ago
  Which is still more familiarity than before.

Students get used to your pipeline before you hire them. The technology is nothing groundbreaking but the best that is available for free. Most students will take that opportunity.

bombcar 4y ago

This is huge and people underestimate how valuable it can be for a company. DreamWorks Animation's product is not MoonRay, it is movies and they're commodizing their complement. If every animation studio started using MoonRay because of this, they'd have won.

pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
Good point in your second sentence, but hard see where you're coming from in the last one. Surely the win for DreamWorks is the competitive advantage of having aspiring creators be familiar with their pipeline. If all animation studios use MoonRay, then that advantage gets erased, and the ultimate impact is null. (The only way this isn't true is if you subscribe to the belief that more MoonRay use → more MoonRay experts → more DreamWorks movies → more profit. That's probably not sound. This probably won't impact how many movies they put out, just how good they look (after benefiting from open source work) and how easy it is to hire for the movies that they put out.)
- kanzure 4y ago
  > If all animation studios use MoonRay, then that advantage gets erased, and the ultimate impact is null. Other studios could also contribute improvements, which the original studio could benefit from. That's one of my motivations for open-source: I'm selfish and I enjoy the benefits from the efforts of others making my software better, should they find it useful.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    And it would mean that they're all on a level playing field - everyone would be using MoonRay so there wouldn't be an obvious technological advantage. (Note that this could mean that if you thought your software was putting you at an advantage, you might not want to open-source it, but you could also believe that even if it is better, your competitors won't / can't switch to it).
    - com2kid 4y ago
      > And it would mean that they're all on a level playing field - everyone would be using MoonRay so there wouldn't be an obvious technological advantage. But if the improvements to MoonRay drive down production costs for movies, the entire industry wins.
- XorNot 4y ago
  The estimate would be that their tooling investment is no longer a major competitive advantage, compared to other studios. But, if other studios or new studios switch to their tooling or start using it, then functionally they're subsidizing skilling up animators who they can later hire as contractors or full-time onto their projects. They're in the movie business after all - speed of production saves a lot of money.

Someone 4y ago

Can students realistically run this kind of software on the hardware they have? I would guess DreamWorks only runs it on fairly expensive networks, and would not have prioritized keeping it usable on single-machine setups.

mkaic 4y ago
I disagree -- a large part of the lookdev process at animation studios involves single artists working on single workstations with single GPUs while they work on their part of the pipeline. I'd wager that Dreamworks almost certainly does big distributed renders for the final frames of the movie, but a large number of the in-between steps and still-frame test renders probably happen in individual employee's machines -- not to mention that having an engine that can preview the render in near-realtime is a staple of modern 3D pipelines now that we have such beefy graphics cards.

berkut 4y ago

This won't be their entire pipeline though. People will have to use the open source version in vanilla DCCs without all of Dreamworks' integrations, so will only be exposed to a bit of it in terms of configuring the renderer's options.

ziddoap 4y ago
Which is still more familiarity than before.