We’re very excited to announce that 15 students (a mixture of Masters students and undergraduates) from Adelaide University are embarking on a project to take our open source project Earth and extend and improve it to make it even more useful.

We’re very much looking forward to what will result from this collaboration.

On a related note, here are some slides of a presentation that I gave to the students last Thursday. It’s about how to work with people in software development and specifically how we do that at RSP.

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We are very pleased to announce the latest (and first official public release) of PyShake 0.2.

PyShake integrates the compositing package Shake and the Python language by enabling running of Python code from within Shake and by exposing the Shake API to Python.

This release is a giant step forward as it allows the writing of full GUI applications for Shake entirely in Python speeding up development (over the traditional C++ route) massively.

As a little side note, it is wonderful to see that Python is continuing to grow into the “industry standard” scripting language for visual effects applications. Let’s hope that the trend continues.

For more information about PyShake including downloading it please visit http://open.rsp.com.au/projects/pyshake

This morning Sun announced the release of a new Grid Engine snapshot incorporating the array dependency modifications that Rising Sun has been working on.

The text of their announcement follows:

Today we are proud to announce the release of the Grid Engine Array Job Interdependency (ARI) Snapshot courtesy binaries. Array job interdependencies allow to run an individual successor tasks upon completion of their predecessor tasks in a flexible way. The design of the Grid Engine ARI functionality can be found here:

This release is intended to be a public testing and developer solicitation release.

The code for this much demanded feature was contributed under the SISSL license by Rising Sun Pictures (RSP), Australia based feature film visual effects specialist (e.g. Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings). Special thanks goes to John Allen (RSP) who did all the hard work of implementing the changes, to Matthew Landauer (RSP) and John Van Leeuwen (RSP) who wrote the specification and to Andreas Haas (Sun) who supported RSP during the whole specification and implementation time. It is planned to add this functionality to the next major update release of Grid Engine.

The courtesy binaries for a broad range of operating systems are available at:

Please test this snapshot and send support questions and feedback to the “users” mailing list of the Grid Engine open source project.

The corresponding source code tag in the “gridengine” project CVS repository has the name

The corresponding source snapshots are available at the Documents & files page:

We’ve finished working on the specification for our proposed changes to Grid Engine which will improve the handling of dependencies in array jobs. This will make the Grid Engine better at handling the kinds of distributed rendering tasks that are common in visual effects and digital content creation.

The specification is available here.

As mentioned in the previous post, we’ve been using Sun’s Grid Engine software for managing our renderfarm for a while now. I thought it might be interesting for people to know what productions we’ve used it on.

Here is a list of movies that RSP has worked on where all our rendering was managed by Grid Engine:

Currently in production:

• Australia (20th Century Fox)
• The Dark is Rising (20th Century Fox)
• The Ruins (Dreamworks SKG)
• Where the Wild Things Are (Warner Brothers Pictures)

Completed:

• Harry Potter & The Order of the Phoenix (Warner Bros Pictures)
• 28 Weeks Later (Fox Atomic)
• The Last Mimzy (New Line Cinema)
• Blood Diamond (Warner Brothers Pictures)
• Charlotte’s Web (Paramount Pictures)
• Superman Returns (Warner Brothers Pictures)
• Elephant Tales (Myriad Pictures)
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Warner Brothers Pictures)

For a couple of years now at Rising Sun Pictures we’ve been using Sun’s open-source Grid Engine software to manage our renderfarm. We’ve built our own tools around it that make it even easier to use for visual effects work: Tools that integrate farm submission into Maya, XSI, Shake; Tools that help manage complex dependencies between separate tasks as is very common in 3d work; Tools that help artists monitor and manage their jobs running on the renderfarm.

Recently we have started working with Sun to make some improvements to the underlying Grid Engine software that will improve the handling of dependencies in array jobs (where multiple frame renders are packaged up and managed as a single job). These improvements, which we are currently writing the specifications for, will make it easier for anyone in digital content creation and visual effects to use the Grid Engine as their renderfarm scheduling software.

And of course, the changes we make will be merged back into the main software. So, they’ll be available to everyone!

If you are interested in finding out more or collaborating with us just email me at matthew.landauer at rsp.com.au.

Hot on the 0.2 release of Earth, I have some more news.

I’ve finally installed and configured the Continuous Integration and the Team Code Review tools. They are available through [ http://ci.rsp.com.au/ ] for the Continuous Integration (CI) and [ http://crucible.rsp.com.au/ ] for the Team Code Review.

What does this mean for our development process? Well, it just makes public the core values that we hold within the team, i.e. test-driven development, agile and open source. The CI server is running Bamboo, a very nice tool from Atlassian (an Australian company) and the Team Code Review is based on Crucible and FishEye, two really cool tools from Cenqua.

Bamboo checks the SVN tree on a regular basis and runs all the tests on the Earth source code every time something is committed. When a test fails, it will send an email to earth-developers@open.rsp.com.au and a Jabber IM (if you have marked the “plan” as your favourite and your profile as a Jabber XMMP IM address, like a Google Talk one for example). Note that in order to receive the IM you need to add bamboorsp@gmail.com to the list of authorised IM buddies. Information on how to use Bamboo is available from Atlassian.

The Team Code Review tool is a great tool when the development team grows and we should be able to do proper code reviews, share knowledge and increase the quality of the code we release. More information on how to use Crucible is available from Cenqua. This will enable us to work with developers no matter where they are located.

I want to thank Cenqua for giving us a free license to use Crucible (and their SVN analysis and code viewer FishEye) on Earth.

After a month and a bit of work, we’re proud to announce the release of Earth 0.2.

“Earth allows you to find files across a large network of machines and track disk usage in real time. It consists of a daemon that indexes filesystems in real time and reports all the changes back to a central database. This can then be queried through a simple Web interface. Think of it like Spotlight or Beagle, but operating system-independent with a central database for multiple machines. Earth is initially focused on managing the explosion of data that occurs in digital visual effects work.”

This release contains many small usability improvements, several significant performance improvements for the web application, reduced database size, code improvements and a much improved command line interface to the Earth daemon.

Visit the Earth project page for download and installation instructions.

It’s still early days, but we really think it’s already a pretty useful and useable thing. Please check it out!

Finally, after some back and forth, I manage to get this blog up and running. Sorry about that.

We currently host two projects on this site, pyshake and Earth. You can find a lot more information on the respective project pages.

After just a few sprints, we are pleased to announce that the Earth project has released version 0.1. You can download it directly from this site and start indexing and making sense of the over abundance of data.