Jan - Apr: Working Group discuss versions for next calendar year.

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

Create a transparent process, fairly representing the interests of both software vendors and end-user studios.

Lower the barrier to adopting Linux as a supported platform both for software providers and end-user studios.

Reduce complexity and effort required to support Linux in VFX and Animation.

Align software providers to eliminate incompatibilities between common dependencies of DCC software.

The primary goals for the VFX Reference Platform are: 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. Initially this effort was focused on Linux only but in 2020 support for MacOS and Windows was also introduced. 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. 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.

Maya vfx