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Linux got its first big Hollywood break in 1997 when Venice, California studio Digital Domain (D2) used Linux to render the special effects for the hit movie Titanic. We spoke with D2 while they were in production using Linux with Star Trek Nemesis, which has a scheduled release date of December 13, 2002. D2 uses Linux for both renderfarm servers and artist desktops.

D2 has used Linux for 21 motion pictures, including best visual effects Academy Award winners Titanic and What Dreams May Come. D2 has won two Scientific and Technical Achievement Academy Awards: one for Track motion tracking software and the other for the compositing software NUKE.

Star Wars, Episode II: Attack of the Clones, released in May 2002, is Industrial Light & Magic's (ILM) first movie produced after converting its workstations and renderfarm to Linux last year. Located north of San Francisco in San Rafael, California, ILM was founded in 1975 to produce the visual effects for Star Wars. Although owned by George Lucas, ILM produces visual effects for more than Lucasfilm productions, such as the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films. Many other studios seeking that bit of something extra on the cutting edge of special effects use ILM. ILM has received 14 Academy Awards, including ones for its work on Forrest Gump, Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and E.T.

Last month we looked at Nothing Real's Shake, compositing software used on many major motion pictures to add special effects or to overlay animation. Nothing Real was recently acquired by Apple, which plans to use its fast scanline rendering technology in future Apple products. Shake's uncertain future on Linux may benefit competitor Silicon Grail's RAYZ.

Both RAYZ and Shake use an interactive scene-graph interface for defining how effects are assembled. While similar from a user-interface standpoint, RAYZ doesn't use the scanline rendering approach of Shake. “I think caching schemes are more important today than scanline algorithms for optimizing rendering”, says Silicon Grail President Ray Feeney. “Memory is much cheaper now. Scanlines can actually be slower than keeping more blocks in RAM—for example, with rotations.”