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Comment by pier25 | Hacker News Reader

> they gonna lose a generation of creatives

Haven't they already?

I don't do 3D but anecdotally the 3D guys I know all use Windows.

Film 3D is mostly Linux at this point. All the major VFX shops (like Weta) and animation studios (Disney, Pixar, etc) are on Linux for artist workstations. Apple stuff gets lots of use, but mainly iPads for story boarding and such.

Indeed, many bigger VFX companies are on Linux. However, smaller shops are mainly powered by Windows (or at least that's the case here in Finland). Building your production pipeline on Linux is something that not everyone is capable of doing and in many cases not even worth the r&d costs.

I always wondered what do the replace photoshop with on Linux, haven’t worked in the industry yet.

I've tried for ages (since 2010...) to get the VFX studios to work with me on making Krita good enough for their needs. I've visited dneg, worked with Intel and other parties, but in the end, the studios yell they want to get rid of the shared windows/photoshop pc in the corner office -- but don't want to put in any actual effort. In the meantime, we're getting there anyway.

my single experience with Krita is trying to load hdr raw images in it where it failed with no major error

I imagine in bigger VFX companies the texture artists use Windows or Mac and produce the assets for the 3D guys which use Linux.

Foundry's Mari [1] is pretty heavily used in bigger VFX houses for texturing and it is also available for Linux. Likewise, Allegorithmic's (now owned by Adobe) Substance is available for Linux [2].

1. https://www.foundry.com/products/mari/requirements

2. https://www.substance3d.com/products/tech-specs

Pixar seems to love the new Mac Pro and metal: This new machine clearly shows Apple is delivering on the needs of professionals at high-end production facilities like Pixar.” https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/06/pro-app-developers-re...

I don't know who here is actively using or developing on the platform with that machine. If we had one here I'd be surprised. All that quote shows is that they are investing in Metal for Hydra so that other platform DCCs don't have to limit macOS usage for their integrations. Apple support wouldn't have any impact on our productions.

It is true that we have Mac systems here, that's no secret. But all 'real' film production work is completely Linux based with a completely custom infrastructure.

Source: Currently at Pixar

Pixar are a bit of an Apple offshoot in the first place though. They are very likely to get Apple kit substantially cheaper than most.

"Steve wasn’t capable of being friends. That wasn’t his personality. Besides the Apple stuff, I had a lot to do with his Pixar thing. I was contacted by the people who became Pixar–I knew them well, and they wanted to get out of Lucasfilm. They called me up and asked me for advice, and so I said, I can talk to Steve. I explained very carefully to him who these people were, and you shouldn’t fuck around with them, like he did with his normal employees. He did a good job with them. [Pixar] was the most honest billion he ever made, because he put a lot of his own personal money into nurturing those guys. They got fabulous. That was Steve’s best hour."

Alan Kay - https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-ab...

Pixar have historically been linked with Apple, though. I wonder if they're currently using the current 'trashcan' Mac Pro, which I imagine would be quite limiting.

"been linked" understates it a bit tbh.

> Pixar began in 1979 as the Graphics Group, part of the Lucasfilm computer division, before its spin-out as a corporation in 1986, with funding by Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs, who became the majority shareholder.

I don’t think Pixar’s Maya-like software ‘man v’ runs on macOS, at least it didn’t a couple of years ago (my ex was a TD at Pixar and used to complain about the old version of Linux they were on). I’m pretty sure the demos they showed were of their file format viewer which is a separate thing.

This is Apple marketing spiel. They probably got those testimonials after demoing some new products to executives for a day and then asking for a paragraph to put on a website.

(Also almost every single one of those is from a CEO or VP, not someone who's job it is to actually use these things.)

What software suites are these companies using? I know some of these huge companies have their own in-house stuff but are the big commercial modelling products supporting linux now? I wasn't aware there were really options aside from blender. Also kind of surprises me that artists would be happy on a platform where you can't fire up Photoshop to muck around with a texture map.

Houdini, Maya, Nuke -- all the really big names are on Linux and have been there for a decade or more.

I've heard Pixar uses RenderMan extensively, which I think uses Linux as its primary platform.

Pixar develops and sells RenderMan. The engine itself support Linux as the primary use case, but also Windows and macOS. They all support the same feature-set with the exception of Optix on macOS.

Back when I was doing a lot of 3D and other work that required Photoshop, I used a VM in Linux to make that work. This was back in 2008-2009 though, so I'm not sure if others do that anymore or just use a different PC, other software, etc.

Apple has always marketed their products as being for creative professionals, but has that ever actually been the reality? Feels to me like that marketing is really intended to hook non professionals into thinking that that's what they need to be successful.

>Haven't they already?

3D motion design was actually quite Mac centric, because many people came into it from 2D graphic design where Macs are widely used. Folks just kept their old Mac Pros and went with fat GPU's for rendering in the last 5 years or so. But with Nvidia dominating in the GPU rendering space and Apples stance against Nvidia it's kind of a roads end for professional 3D people.

It's not that it would cut into Apples profits directly, but good artists and designers are taste makers, it hurts Apple as a brand going forward, 3D is only getting more popular with AR.

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