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Pixar's Render Farm

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382 points brundolf | 3 comments | 02 Jan 21 19:56 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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banana_giraffe ◴[02 Jan 21 21:38 UTC] No.25616781[source]▶
One of the things they mentioned briefly in a little documentary on the making of Soul is that all of the animators work on fairly dumb terminals connected to a back end instance.

I can appreciate that working well when people are in the office, but I'm amazed that worked out for them when people moved to work from home. I have trouble getting some of my engineers to have a stable connection stable enough for VS Code's remote mode. I can't imagine trying to use a modern GUI over these connections.

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nikon ◴[03 Jan 21 00:17 UTC] No.25618038[source]▶
Where can I watch the documentary?
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banana_giraffe ◴[03 Jan 21 01:00 UTC] No.25618320[source]▶
It's a little bit on Disney+, one of the extras called "Soul, Improvised". It's very much not technical, more focused on the emotional impact of WFH.
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1. nikon ◴[03 Jan 21 03:53 UTC] No.25619249[source]▶
Thanks! I just checked it out. So interesting they use Linux for non-developer staff!
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2. dagmx ◴[03 Jan 21 04:29 UTC] No.25619457[source]▶
Most of the big animation and visual effects studios are Linux based.

We even have a reference platform spec for some kind of industry wide baseline: https://vfxplatform.com/

3. JustinGarrison ◴[05 Jan 21 07:31 UTC] No.25643094[source]▶
I worked at Disney Animation on the Linux engineering team for a few years. The flexibility of Linux was a key enabler for us being able to produce movies the way we did. Artists overall seemed to love the power of the Linux desktop setup we provided.