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GIMP and Linux
in Hollywood

Michael J. Hammel

mjhammel@graphics-muse.org
www.graphics-muse.org

GIMP Origins

Birth

1995: senior project at UC Berkeley

1996: 0.54

No layers

Supported plugins

Based on Motif

Me: The Sparkle plugin

Childhood

0.60: GIMP begot GTK+

Peter fed up with Motif limitations

GTK+ begot GNOME

GNOME begot the desktop

Miguel de Icaza went nuts and now we're cursed with Mono

Teenager

Feb 97: 0.99

Me: Oct 97: GIMP in Linux Journal

Jun 98: 1.0

Me: Dec 98: The Artist's Guide to the GIMP

Nearly 6 years to get to 1.0

Desktop already thriving in many ways

Painful lessons ahead

The Visual Effects Society

1998: Film-GIMP

Rythm and Hues

Visual Effects company

Run by head of Visual Effects Society

Paid GIMP developers for deep paint support

16bit and 32bit channels

HOLLYWOOD branch of CVS

Never merged with mainline

GEGL was better choice

2002: Cinepaint

Robin Rowe

Resurrected HOLLYWOOD branch

Changed name to Cinepaint

Supported by industry

Robin is in Hollywood

Visual Effects members can meet about the product

2008: GEGL in GIMP

10 years after 1.0: Finally, work starts on merging GEGL in GIMP

Expected for 2.6 release (2.5.x are developer releases)

GEGL: Generic Graphics Library

graph based image processing framework supports

deep paint (16, 32bit color channels)

Multiple color models/spaces (re: CMYK, etc.)

Text rendering improvements

Layer effects

Linux in Hollywood

1998: Titanic

Rendering vs Modeling Pipelines

Modeling: Maya, Houdini or (these days) Blender

Rendering: RenderMan (Pixar)

1st use: Digital Domain's Titanic render farm

Darryl Strauss, Linux Helps Bring Titanic to Life

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2494

Artist's work on SGI's or NTs

Rendering on Linux: DEC Alphas

1999: Houdini Port

Me, Houdini: Magic doesn't just happen

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2494

Driven by Visual Effects Industry needs

Chicken and egg problem

No graphics drivers because no apps need them

No apps because no sufficient graphics drivers

Side Effects Software pushed the envelope

2001: Linux goes to the Movies

Me, Salon.com

http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/11/01/linux_hollywood/index.html

Visual Effects Industry

Dreamworks, Pixar, Digital Domain, Silicon Grail

1999: Dreamworks decides to migrate completely to Linux Shrek! is first production

An Industry Migration

VESTECH 2000: Linux Summit

Disposable computing

2 year cycle for animations

Replace renderfarm with each production

Existing options

SGI dying

Windows: not enough focus on enterprise issues

Existing expertise was Unix based

A Lesson For All

Lessons from the Visual Effects Industry

Share information

Open Source wrong behaviours are not easily forgiven

The end users are in charge.

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