GIMP was originally created in 1995 as a student project and slowly developed through the 1990s with early versions having limitations like only supporting the Motif toolkit. In 1998, a Hollywood visual effects company paid GIMP developers to add deeper paint support like 16-bit and 32-bit color channels to better suit the needs of visual effects work. However, this work was never merged with the main GIMP codebase. In 2002, Cinepaint was created to continue supporting the visual effects industry. It was not until 2008 that GEGL, a graph-based image processing framework, was finally merged into GIMP which improved support for the needs of visual effects work like deep color channels and layer effects. Linux was also gaining popularity

1. GIMP and Linux in Hollywood Michael J. Hammel [email_address] www.graphics-muse.org

2. GIMP Origins

3. Birth 1995: senior project at UC Berkeley 1996: 0.54 No layers Supported plugins Based on Motif Me: The Sparkle plugin

4. Childhood 0.60: GIMP begot GTK+ Peter fed up with Motif limitations GTK+ begot GNOME GNOME begot the desktop Miguel de Icaza went nuts and now we're cursed with Mono

5. Teenager Feb 97: 0.99 Me: Oct 97: GIMP in Linux Journal Jun 98: 1.0 Me: Dec 98: The Artist's Guide to the GIMP Nearly 6 years to get to 1.0 Desktop already thriving in many ways Painful lessons ahead

6. The Visual Effects Society

7. 1998: Film-GIMP Rythm and Hues Visual Effects company Run by head of Visual Effects Society Paid GIMP developers for deep paint support 16bit and 32bit channels HOLLYWOOD branch of CVS Never merged with mainline GEGL was better choice

8. 2002: Cinepaint Robin Rowe Resurrected HOLLYWOOD branch Changed name to Cinepaint Supported by industry Robin is in Hollywood Visual Effects members can meet about the product

9. 2008: GEGL in GIMP 10 years after 1.0: Finally, work starts on merging GEGL in GIMP Expected for 2.6 release (2.5.x are developer releases) GEGL: Generic Graphics Library graph based image processing framework supports deep paint (16, 32bit color channels) Multiple color models/spaces (re: CMYK, etc.) Text rendering improvements Layer effects

10. Linux in Hollywood

11. 1998: Titanic Rendering vs Modeling Pipelines Modeling: Maya, Houdini or (these days) Blender Rendering: RenderMan (Pixar) 1 st use: Digital Domain's Titanic render farm Darryl Strauss, Linux Helps Bring Titanic to Life http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2494 Artist's work on SGI's or NTs Rendering on Linux: DEC Alphas

12. 1999: Houdini Port Me, Houdini: Magic doesn't just happen http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2494 Driven by Visual Effects Industry needs Chicken and egg problem No graphics drivers because no apps need them No apps because no sufficient graphics drivers Side Effects Software pushed the envelope

13. 2001: Linux goes to the Movies Me, Salon.com http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/11/01/linux_hollywood/index.html Visual Effects Industry Dreamworks, Pixar, Digital Domain, Silicon Grail 1999: Dreamworks decides to migrate completely to Linux – Shrek! is first production

14. An Industry Migration VESTECH 2000: Linux Summit Disposable computing 2 year cycle for animations Replace renderfarm with each production Existing options SGI dying Windows: not enough focus on enterprise issues Existing expertise was Unix based

15. A Lesson For All Lessons from the Visual Effects Industry Share information Open Source “wrong behaviours” are not easily forgiven The end users are in charge.