More on Pixar's OS X Migration

[iPC]

Most likely since XServe G5s are excellent value for their money, it wouldn't surprise me that Pixar would consider them (ok, ok, Jobs is a big factor there). These days, even Sun has had to admit x86 into their hardware line-up, delegating the SPARC series to their high-end offerings. The G5s are excellent competition to both.

It would be interesting to see just how scaleable and robust Mac OS X + Xserves can be. Big Mac at Virginia Tech's TeraScale computing facility was nice and all, but I'd like to see a real-world, non-academic/scientific-type of work done on a huge farm of Mac-based systems.

Steve Jobs is of zero factor in this decision. Business decisions made by multi-million dollar studio houses (especially those branching out on their own - no more Disney) give no regard to emotional loyalties of the CEO. If they do, then Pixar will fail, it is just a matter of when. I am sure Steve recognizes this, and that is why they did not use G4 or earlier Macs for those tasks.

This is more of a loss for SGI than a win for Apple. If SGI was actively moving forward, then they wouldn't have lost the business.

 

[agreenster]

I am interested if there will be more developement of Maya (on the mac) before this. I understand that Pixar mainly use Maya and Renderman.

Not true. Pixar uses Maya for modeling only pretty much. (any version newer than 3 or so would probably do.) All of their effects, animation, setup and simulation software is mostly proprietary. (Marionette is their own animation package) All of the tools are Unix/Irix, so porting them to OSX wasnt too difficult. Rendering, of course, is all Renderman, which has been available publicly for OSX for almost a year.

So they really dont need Maya Unlimited.

 

[The Ancients]

Wow, hope theirs don't crash as much as my G4 iBook does or else we'll never have a Finding Nemo 2.

Maybe you should have that checked out. Only time we've ever had a machine crash is because something was frelled hardware-wise.

..k

 

[corvus]

Funny how Pixar hasn't been with apple hardware. I guess they knew like everyone else that the G4 wasn't really that competitive.

well, not exactly. it was very competitive for most graphics type of work. but the G4 was not designed for pixar type of processing, that is for sure. i used one for years for final cut pro and it was awesome. a very nice machine.

 

[Urdam]

Pixar's CEO is Steve Jobs!!! They should have switched long ago.