

In the run up to SIGGRAPH 2013, the Visual Effects Society invited a group of major software vendors to create a working group to better align Linux support between them. In previous years Linux platform requirements for DCC packages was mostly led by Autodesk's Maya and other vendors typically followed its lead. This complexity results in VFX studios requiring specialist expertise to integrate a pipeline around these dependencies or often even deciding against supporting Linux altogether. Since the late 90's an increasing number of studios have started running a flavour of Linux as their primary OS for artist workstations for reasons of reliability, flexibility, cost, performance and as a natural progression from SGI's IRIX.ĭue to the flexibility of the Linux platform, there are a number of different distributions on varying release schedules and this combines with software providers all having their own schedules to create a situation where DCC software packages are often released with different and incompatible dependencies. VFX and Animation studios typically integrate off the shelf digital content creation (DCC) tools, such as Maya or Houdini, with in-house software and other 3rd party packages to create a connected end-to-end pipeline for their artists.
