Why SideFx doesn't support Solaris ?

actually i also wonder why it stopped so early with IRIX as well… i know “old” IRIX sgi machines arent used that much anymore.. but.. i'd like so much to use houdini on my octane …

cheers.

It costs quite a lot to use platforms that really aren't used for 3D animation… Every different platform a software company supports sucks up significant support hours, which is the main problem.

Since no-one else supports Irix (even Alias dropped it when they were still owned by SGI!!) it doesn't make sense for SESI to do the same.

That being said, if a large customer wants a certain platform, I'm pretty sure they could get a port. It'd have to be a large customer though )

Cheers
,
Peter B

I didnt ment to “not agree” about such drop of support.. i just wanted to express my sadness about that … my sadness is all about IRIX that's getting at the end… sad.

cheers.

I welcome change, as long as there's options. I share your sense of nostalgia over the “old days” when a new SGI workstation being shipped was a really important moment, and you were part of a relatively few number of people in the world that got to drive it.

However, don't forget things became this way because SGI simply refused to watch what was going on in the world around them. High costs, crippling support packages, a major attitude problem, and sideblinders meant they were destined for the recycle bin.

I am *so* thankful that linux caught on. There was a narrow period of time there where I thought we'd be forced to run Windows. However, had Linux not caught on(and majorly improved), I'll bet the Solaris' of the world would have become the serious IRIX replacement. This business needs a unix alternative.

Cheers,

J.C.

I think that when Adobe will decide definitely to port their core apps like Photoshop, After Effects or Premiere. Linux will be a serious competitor against Windows.
Today only big houses, and some middle and smaller, but mainly the big houses can afford to have linux boxes due to the lack of apps.
If Adobe finally port their apps the the rest of the industry follow this movement and then all of us will have a serious supported platform.

i haven't tried it yet but someone mentioned that cinepaint is as good as photoshop.

http://cinepaint.movieeditor.com/ [cinepaint.movieeditor.com]

altbighead
i haven't tried it yet but someone mentioned that cinepaint is as good as photoshop.

http://cinepaint.movieeditor.com/ [cinepaint.movieeditor.com]

I have tested it, in fact at the moment i use gimp 2 instead of photoshop, i prefer to learn gimp that to change to other computer every time.
About cinepaint, this is a very promising application, but at the moment is at a very early state of development (alpha I think) so it needs more features to be used in a day to day basis.
The development team have recently ported all the app to the FLTK toolkit, developed by DD for apps like Nuke, and redesigned all the core of the app, so I think that in 5 or 6 months it will be a good option.
Another interesting and promising application is jahshaka.
About FLTK: http://www.fltk.org/ [fltk.org]
About jahshaka.: http://www.jahshaka.org/ [jahshaka.org]

I've been less than impressed with cinepaint - it's fine, but as you infer development seems to be stalled quite a bit. All sorts of politics at play here - the group that was doing gimp were supposedly going to go down one path, but then did a turn and orphaned a lot of the code that was critical to making gimp a film, image-sequence sort of app. Shame, really, although I must admit I personally am not remotely enamoured with the Photoshop approach to things, despite the fact that so many people seem to be. I've never been a huge fan of gimp, therefore. I would love to see this move along, though.

Jahshaka has always been a very poor man's Discreet. Even the interface seems to be trying to mimic it, but the toolset has been extremely primitive for a very long time. I never got the impression that they're aiming at serious high end shops.

I love open source, the notion of it, the principles behind it, but I haven't really seen the mid-to-large apps ever seriously take off in the FX business. Certainly Apache, Linux, OpenOffice, Mozilla/FF are all polished, powerful highend OS products, but when you look at them, they have a huge market. There's tons of users, thus development is brisk. This is where OS works very, very well. Where it suffers is in the vertical markets like Visual FX, where they might have some very useful smaller tools and utilities, but I think it's up to the proprietary software companies like SESI to provide the big guns.

The area that OS can shine in our business is in file formats and standards.

Cheers,

J.C.

P.S. (Addendum) Well, OK, Blender isn't bad.

I've been less than impressed with cinepaint - it's fine, but as you infer development seems to be stalled quite a bit. All sorts of politics at play here - the group that was doing gimp were supposedly going to go down one path, but then did a turn and orphaned a lot of the code that was critical to making gimp a film, image-sequence sort of app. Shame, really, although I must admit I personally am not remotely enamoured with the Photoshop approach to things, despite the fact that so many people seem to be. I've never been a huge fan of gimp, therefore. I would love to see this move along, though.

Yes there was problems with the gimp project, this is the reason of the fork of the cinepaint project, both project are similar but have different goals.
I think that the Cinepaint developmetn is not so stalled, the only reason is that the team has rewrited the core of the app, to solve amny of the problems that gimp has, and to build a solid base needs time, this occurs in every software development, you invest time to build the core, and then you can develop many features, i hope that in the next months the program will suffer an important improvement.
And i am agree with you I am one of these men that hates the Photoshop way of doing things

Jahshaka has always been a very poor man's Discreet. Even the interface seems to be trying to mimic it, but the toolset has been extremely primitive for a very long time. I never got the impression that they're aiming at serious high end shops.

I am not an expert in this field, but yes i think that Jahshaka needs a great improvement related to features.

I love open source, the notion of it, the principles behind it, but I haven't really seen the mid-to-large apps ever seriously take off in the FX business. Certainly Apache, Linux, OpenOffice, Mozilla/FF are all polished, powerful highend OS products, but when you look at them, they have a huge market. There's tons of users, thus development is brisk. This is where OS works very, very well. Where it suffers is in the vertical markets like Visual FX, where they might have some very useful smaller tools and utilities, but I think it's up to the proprietary software companies like SESI to provide the big guns. Smile

And again agree with you, the software that we use are very specialized, this is the field for the propietary development, the comodity software is the field for the open development.
But is always great to find an open tool that helps in your daily work