Avatar Movie made possible with Linux
Avatar was revolutionary. It was legendary. At my hometown of Kolkata alone, it made all the multiplexes to upgrade to 3-D vision glasses and facilitated the opening of many iMax theaters at unexpected locations across the country. But in-spite of all the commercial advertisement, there are some facts related to Avatar which went unheard.
Did you all know, Avatar used graphics designed by a four time Academy Award winning visual effects facility based at New Zealand. It has done graphics for X-Men, did it for I Robot and now, it has also done it for Avatar.
To my surprise, the company uses all non-windows software to achieve all these cutting edge graphics. The systems used to render these graphics were all using RHEL as their OS and were all HP Blade server clusters. All these systems are 64 bit and the cluster at Weta Digital is one of the world’s largest Linux clusters. It is ranked #193 amongst the top 500 supercomputers of the world with processing capabilities of 10 Gigaflops.
It is great to know that most of the software used to render these graphics were all Linux software like SoftImage, CompTime, Cine-Paint etc.
Weta Digital has won four Academy Awards and BAFTAs. Did you see the movie Avatar? If you liked it, you can also check the Avatar Windows 7 theme.
Omkar Dutta
January 7th, 2010 at 6:00 pm #
Can’t believe if linux can do such a magic. Thanks for the info.
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Gojeg
January 8th, 2010 at 3:31 am #
Proud of this!! OMG,that’s a super computer.. Great news buddy.
.-= Gojeg´s last blog ..Irresistible, Free Wordpress Theme =-.
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Rishabh Agarwal
January 8th, 2010 at 3:59 am #
Linux rocks in every other field and unlike windows, it’s not only for PC’s
.-= Rishabh Agarwal´s last blog ..Mashable: We Are Not Selling Ourselves To AOL =-.
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Todd
January 8th, 2010 at 9:04 am #
Irony. This is a “whee whoo!” article about linux being used to render avatar… and ends with a link to a Windows theme. Hmm.
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Ali
January 8th, 2010 at 2:07 pm #
i just wanna say WoW!!!!!
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John the Avatar Fan
January 27th, 2010 at 5:43 pm #
Avatar is truely a vision of what many movies will be like in the future. It is even better that it was made with Linux!
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Kelvin (SourceSqr)
April 16th, 2010 at 6:19 am #
it wasn’t surprising if Avatar uses linux clusters to do the math, but it was surely surprising that actually created the CG with Linux based software!
Thanks for the news, proud to be a Linux user :)
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gurpreet
April 27th, 2010 at 7:03 am #
hi there Chinmoy Kanjilal. u are spreading wrong information to the people about the software used in avatar. avatar was rendered with maya and they photoshop for the creatures textures, and adobe after effects for the compositing. people like you should be punished for spreading wrong information just shut ur mouth if u do not know the correct info. why spread worng info man?? . i seriously do not understand you need to check http://www.adobe .com. which clearly mentioned the tolls used in avatar.
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Greg Sayle
May 3rd, 2010 at 2:31 am #
Great to see more exposure for Linux. A great step forward in the info area.
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Kaippally Reply:
June 3rd, 2010 at 6:30 am
I wonder why Autodesk would lie through thier teeth about Avatar. Shame on you Autodesk
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/item?id=14270942&siteID=123112
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