Background

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. 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.

Due 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. This complexity results in VFX studios requiring specialist expertise to integrate a pipeline around these dependencies or often even deciding against supporting Linux altogether.

In previous years Linux platform requirements for DCC packages was mostly led by Autodesk's Maya and other vendors typically followed its lead. 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.

This initiative resulted in the VFX Reference Platform, a collection of major library and tool versions that are updated annually with the objective of being a common platform for all VFX and animation studios and software providers to target. Initially this effort was focused on Linux only but in 2020 support for MacOS and Windows was also introduced. The VFX Reference Platform is driven by a small number of software vendors with a longer term plan to include more software providers earlier in the annual review cycle.

Goals

The primary goals for the VFX Reference Platform are:

• Align software providers to eliminate incompatibilities between common dependencies of DCC software.
• Reduce complexity and effort required to support Linux in VFX and Animation.
• Lower the barrier to adopting Linux as a supported platform both for software providers and end-user studios.
• Create a transparent process, fairly representing the interests of both software vendors and end-user studios.

Process

The VFX Reference Platform is updated each year following this schedule:

• Jan - Apr: Working Group discuss versions for next calendar year.
• May: Draft Reference Platform for the next year is published and feedback invited from the community.
• SIGGRAPH: Community meeting to review proposed final Platform.
• Early Sep: VFX Reference Platform for next year published.
• Sep - Oct: Late change requests accepted only if there is unanimous agreement from the Working Group.
• Nov: Final Platform locked, no further changes accepted to allow time for integration and testing.

The VFX Reference Platform Working Group is made up of interested parties initially invited by the VES Technology Committee and currently has several members, two representatives from the VES and two each from three major software vendors. If a vendor or other organization would like to join the Working Group, please send a request with details.