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i'm curious: what is the incentive for dreamworks to open-source this? surely having exclusive access to a parallel renderer of this quality is a competitive ad

i'm curious: what is the incentive for dreamworks to open-source this? surely having exclusive access to a parallel renderer of this quality is a competitive advantage to other studios?

ronsor 4y ago
The other large studios that compete with them (e.g. Pixar) already have their own just-as-good renderers.
- fuzzybear3965 4y ago
  Even still, what's the incentive to open-source? So the community can bootstrap a better solution than Pixar?
  - mdorazio 4y ago
    By showing they care about open source, there's a chance they'll attract developers and animators who care about that.
    - pipo234 4y ago
      Seems targeted at CentOS7, support for which is sunset in little over a year. Smells a bit like abandonware, hoping for adoption by unpaid volunteers. Still, dumping it into FOSS community is not the worst graveyard for commercial software...
      - Vt71fcAqt7 4y ago
        They just released a feature film with this renderer, grossing $462 million and widely praised for its animation. Large studios don't update so regularly vs e.g. a startup. They have very specific setups, which is in fact a large part of why it took them so long to release moonray vs when they said they would last year. And they are moving to Rocky Linux soon IIRC. >dumping it into FOSS community They are not "dumping" anything. Would it have hurt to look into the facts before commenting?
      - not2b 4y ago
        It's not a big deal to take something built for CentOS7 and port to a later Red Hat (or clone) distro. It appears that they released a setup for what they use, which is CentOS7.
      - op00to 4y ago
        Major animated movies take years to develop, and they don’t like to change the build process during. I used to cover a major animation studio for a major Linux vendor and they did in fact use very old shit.
      - packetslave 4y ago
        re: CentOS7, the VFX Reference Platform (https://vfxplatform.com/ https://vfxplatform.com/) is probably relevant here. Their latest Linux Platform Recommendations report from August last year already covers migrations off of CentOS 7 / RHEL7 before the end of maintenance in 2024 Studios don't want to upgrade fast (e.g. they're not interested in running Debian unstable or CentOS's streaming updates thing)... they're interested in stability for hundreds of artists' workstations. Getting commercial Linux apps like Maya, Houdini, Nuke, etc. working well at scale is hard enough without the underlying OS changing all the time.
  - toyg 4y ago
    Or create a pipeline of young talent who can come from university already trained on their system.
  - chungy 4y ago
    Why not? The tool may be good, but the output visuals are only as good as the artists that use said tools. They can open source the tools all they want and try to hire all the talent that can use it. :)
bhouston 4y ago
At this point every studio has their own renderer, Pixar has RenderMan, Illumination has one from MacGuff, Disney has their Hyperion, and Animal Logic has Glimpse.
- packetslave 4y ago
  and there's still plenty of Arnold and Clarisse houses out there.
StrangeATractor 4y ago
I can imagine a few reasons why they'd do this, but some of it may just be 'why not'. Studio Ghibli has done the same thing with their animation software and it hasn't turned into a disaster for them. Making movies, especially movies that people will pay to watch is hard, and any serious competitors already have their own solutions. If people use moonray and that becomes a popular approach, competitors who don't use it are at a disadvantage from a hiring perspective. Also, DreamWorks controls the main repo of what may become a popular piece of tooling. There's soft power to be had there.
Vt71fcAqt7 4y ago
They mentioned in this video[0] that they expect others, mainly other studios, to contribute to the project. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ozd4JqquG3k&t=117 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ozd4JqquG3k&t=117
satvikpendem 4y ago
The competitive advantage is in storytelling, not necessarily visual fidelity. People will watch a somewhat worse looking movie with a better story than a better looking movie with a worse story. And honestly, can anyone really tell slightly worse graphical quality these days when so many animated movies already look good? The exception, of course, is James Cameron and his Avatar series. People will absolutely watch something that looks 10x better because the visual fidelity itself is the draw, it's the main attraction over the story. This is usually not the case in most movies however.
- nineteen999 4y ago
  The rendering in the Avatar movies is at the cutting edge. But quite apart from the very uninteresting storytellying there's something there that just doesn't work for me visually - I don't know if it's the uncanny valley effect of the giant skinny blue people with giant eyes or what, but I'd definitely rather watching something creative and painterly like the Puss in Boots movie, or even something like the Last of Us with really well integrated CG visuals and VFX that aren't necessarily top of the line, but well integrated and support a good story.
  - satvikpendem 4y ago
    Did you watch in IMAX 3D? I watched in both 3D and 2D and the 2D simply cannot compare to the 3D. The way most 3D movies work is the 3D effects are done after the fact in post-production. 3D in Avatar movies are done entirely in the shooting phase, through 3D cameras. Hence, the 3D in Avatar films is much more immersive to me than in something like Dr Strange 2, which simply could not compare.
    - NateEag 4y ago
      I remember watching Avatar in 3D and being blown away (both by the dreadful screenwriting and by the amazing 3D effect). It taught me that the key you immersive 3D is to treat the screen as a window. Things have depth beyond it, but never protrude out of it. I noticed only two shots in the movie where anything protruded from the screen towards me, and they really caught my attention.
Someone1234 4y ago
Unreal is eating everyone's lunch. If they cannot get anyone else to contribute to their renderer, it will wind up getting shelved for Unreal with a lot of smaller animation studios already using Unreal instead of more traditional 3D Rendering solutions like Maya.
- Vt71fcAqt7 4y ago
  I'm not really sure if they are competing with Unreal. Large studios will probably never use real time rendering for the final render unless it achieves the same quality. Dreamworks have built a renderer specifically for render farms (little use of GPUs, for example) which means they are not targeting small studios at all, rather something like Illumination Entertainment or Sony (think Angry Birds movie).
- dahart 4y ago
  > If they cannot get anyone else to contribute to their renderer, it will wind up getting shelved for Unreal Why do you think this? Nobody in film or vfx is using Unreal for final rendering, Unreal is built for games not offline path tracing.
  - Someone1234 4y ago
    Tons of studios are now using Unreal for final rendering, including Disney and several blockbuster movies. The fantastic thing about Unreal is that you can do realtime rendering on-set (e.g. for directorial choices/actor feedback) and then post-production upscale it with the ceiling only being cost. Unreal in the TV/Movie industry is already huge and only getting bigger, year-on-year. You've definitely seen a TV or Movie that used Unreal.
    - packetslave 4y ago
      You've definitely seen a TV or Movie that used Unreal. Name a major-studio movie that rendered final camera-ready VFX in Unreal. For TV, you can name The Mandalorian season one, sure, but even then, ILM switched The Volume to their own in-house real-time engine for season two.
daniel-thompson 4y ago
> surely having exclusive access to a parallel renderer of this quality is a competitive advantage to other studios? The renderer is an important of the VFX toolkit, but there are more than a few production-quality renderers out there, some of them are even FOSS. A studio or film's competitive advantage is more around storytelling and art design.
RantyDave 4y ago
Open sourcing the trailing edge stuff is a great way to keep people behind you.
johnvanommen 4y ago
They were acquired in 2016: https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/28/comcast-to-acquire-dreamworks-animation-for-3-8-billion/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/28/comcast-to-acquire-dreamwo... Perhaps they've moved on to a new renderer.

i'm curious: what is the incentive for dreamworks to open-source this? surely having exclusive access to a parallel renderer of this quality is a competitive advantage to other studios?

ronsor 4y ago

The other large studios that compete with them (e.g. Pixar) already have their own just-as-good renderers.

fuzzybear3965 4y ago
Even still, what's the incentive to open-source? So the community can bootstrap a better solution than Pixar?
- mdorazio 4y ago
  By showing they care about open source, there's a chance they'll attract developers and animators who care about that.
  - pipo234 4y ago
    Seems targeted at CentOS7, support for which is sunset in little over a year. Smells a bit like abandonware, hoping for adoption by unpaid volunteers. Still, dumping it into FOSS community is not the worst graveyard for commercial software...
    - Vt71fcAqt7 4y ago
      They just released a feature film with this renderer, grossing $462 million and widely praised for its animation. Large studios don't update so regularly vs e.g. a startup. They have very specific setups, which is in fact a large part of why it took them so long to release moonray vs when they said they would last year. And they are moving to Rocky Linux soon IIRC. >dumping it into FOSS community They are not "dumping" anything. Would it have hurt to look into the facts before commenting?
    - not2b 4y ago
      It's not a big deal to take something built for CentOS7 and port to a later Red Hat (or clone) distro. It appears that they released a setup for what they use, which is CentOS7.
    - op00to 4y ago
      Major animated movies take years to develop, and they don’t like to change the build process during. I used to cover a major animation studio for a major Linux vendor and they did in fact use very old shit.
    - packetslave 4y ago
      re: CentOS7, the VFX Reference Platform (https://vfxplatform.com/ https://vfxplatform.com/) is probably relevant here. Their latest Linux Platform Recommendations report from August last year already covers migrations off of CentOS 7 / RHEL7 before the end of maintenance in 2024 Studios don't want to upgrade fast (e.g. they're not interested in running Debian unstable or CentOS's streaming updates thing)... they're interested in stability for hundreds of artists' workstations. Getting commercial Linux apps like Maya, Houdini, Nuke, etc. working well at scale is hard enough without the underlying OS changing all the time.
- toyg 4y ago
  Or create a pipeline of young talent who can come from university already trained on their system.
- chungy 4y ago
  Why not? The tool may be good, but the output visuals are only as good as the artists that use said tools. They can open source the tools all they want and try to hire all the talent that can use it. :)

bhouston 4y ago

At this point every studio has their own renderer, Pixar has RenderMan, Illumination has one from MacGuff, Disney has their Hyperion, and Animal Logic has Glimpse.

packetslave 4y ago
and there's still plenty of Arnold and Clarisse houses out there.

StrangeATractor 4y ago

I can imagine a few reasons why they'd do this, but some of it may just be 'why not'. Studio Ghibli has done the same thing with their animation software and it hasn't turned into a disaster for them. Making movies, especially movies that people will pay to watch is hard, and any serious competitors already have their own solutions. If people use moonray and that becomes a popular approach, competitors who don't use it are at a disadvantage from a hiring perspective. Also, DreamWorks controls the main repo of what may become a popular piece of tooling. There's soft power to be had there.

Vt71fcAqt7 4y ago

They mentioned in this video[0] that they expect others, mainly other studios, to contribute to the project. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ozd4JqquG3k&t=117 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ozd4JqquG3k&t=117

satvikpendem 4y ago

The competitive advantage is in storytelling, not necessarily visual fidelity. People will watch a somewhat worse looking movie with a better story than a better looking movie with a worse story. And honestly, can anyone really tell slightly worse graphical quality these days when so many animated movies already look good? The exception, of course, is James Cameron and his Avatar series. People will absolutely watch something that looks 10x better because the visual fidelity itself is the draw, it's the main attraction over the story. This is usually not the case in most movies however.

nineteen999 4y ago
The rendering in the Avatar movies is at the cutting edge. But quite apart from the very uninteresting storytellying there's something there that just doesn't work for me visually - I don't know if it's the uncanny valley effect of the giant skinny blue people with giant eyes or what, but I'd definitely rather watching something creative and painterly like the Puss in Boots movie, or even something like the Last of Us with really well integrated CG visuals and VFX that aren't necessarily top of the line, but well integrated and support a good story.
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  Did you watch in IMAX 3D? I watched in both 3D and 2D and the 2D simply cannot compare to the 3D. The way most 3D movies work is the 3D effects are done after the fact in post-production. 3D in Avatar movies are done entirely in the shooting phase, through 3D cameras. Hence, the 3D in Avatar films is much more immersive to me than in something like Dr Strange 2, which simply could not compare.
  - NateEag 4y ago
    I remember watching Avatar in 3D and being blown away (both by the dreadful screenwriting and by the amazing 3D effect). It taught me that the key you immersive 3D is to treat the screen as a window. Things have depth beyond it, but never protrude out of it. I noticed only two shots in the movie where anything protruded from the screen towards me, and they really caught my attention.

Someone1234 4y ago

Unreal is eating everyone's lunch. If they cannot get anyone else to contribute to their renderer, it will wind up getting shelved for Unreal with a lot of smaller animation studios already using Unreal instead of more traditional 3D Rendering solutions like Maya.

Vt71fcAqt7 4y ago
I'm not really sure if they are competing with Unreal. Large studios will probably never use real time rendering for the final render unless it achieves the same quality. Dreamworks have built a renderer specifically for render farms (little use of GPUs, for example) which means they are not targeting small studios at all, rather something like Illumination Entertainment or Sony (think Angry Birds movie).
dahart 4y ago
> If they cannot get anyone else to contribute to their renderer, it will wind up getting shelved for Unreal Why do you think this? Nobody in film or vfx is using Unreal for final rendering, Unreal is built for games not offline path tracing.
- Someone1234 4y ago
  Tons of studios are now using Unreal for final rendering, including Disney and several blockbuster movies. The fantastic thing about Unreal is that you can do realtime rendering on-set (e.g. for directorial choices/actor feedback) and then post-production upscale it with the ceiling only being cost. Unreal in the TV/Movie industry is already huge and only getting bigger, year-on-year. You've definitely seen a TV or Movie that used Unreal.
  - packetslave 4y ago
    You've definitely seen a TV or Movie that used Unreal. Name a major-studio movie that rendered final camera-ready VFX in Unreal. For TV, you can name The Mandalorian season one, sure, but even then, ILM switched The Volume to their own in-house real-time engine for season two.

daniel-thompson 4y ago

> surely having exclusive access to a parallel renderer of this quality is a competitive advantage to other studios? The renderer is an important of the VFX toolkit, but there are more than a few production-quality renderers out there, some of them are even FOSS. A studio or film's competitive advantage is more around storytelling and art design.

RantyDave 4y ago

Open sourcing the trailing edge stuff is a great way to keep people behind you.

johnvanommen 4y ago

They were acquired in 2016: https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/28/comcast-to-acquire-dreamworks-animation-for-3-8-billion/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/28/comcast-to-acquire-dreamwo... Perhaps they've moved on to a new renderer.