Background

Each tool contributes to a specific stage in the pipeline and some of them are dependant upon the design assumptions and output of the other. Therefore, it is necessary to have an overview of the production pipeline and the context for their development.

This is intended to give an insight to the reader of how the various tools in the pipeline depend on each other and can function together to deliver a production.

No Panacea!

There can be many ways of solving a production into a pipeline, while no one solution is good enough for everyone. The effectiveness of the structure of a pipeline depends upon the business model and culture of the organization, its size and the history of the type of projects done under it.

With these factors in mind we shall now have a look at the proposed pipeline.

The Production Pipeline

The underlying pipeline can be schematically represented by the following diagram.

Schematic View of the production pipeline

Each phase of this image is represented by a circle. The blue boxes represent the artifacts produced in the phase and the grey boxes represent the processes involved to produce them.

Symbol	Meaning
	Pipeline Phase
	Pipeline Process
	Artifacts

Observations

Now we shall have a look at some important observations about the pipeline view that this figure represents.

Business Model

The image shows the division of the complete production process into three main areas. Pre-production, production and post-production. Moreover, the assets, and production planning have been placed under the production area. This is due to the nature of the projects done at many studios who integrate into the industry as a production service company. This means that the pre-production is done separately either outside the studio or in an art department which employs the services of the production department to get the project executed.

Considering asset development process as a part of production is very useful in this business model. Even in the case when asset development is carried out upstream, there is always some sort of prepping to be done for production. Securing your assets is a good exercise of this business model and helps the standardize the transition into production.

Medium Size Studio

The production pipeline that the current batch of scripts supports have been developed for a medium-sized studio.

This meant that teams were organized into departments according to their function in the production process. Each department has a supervisor who is responsible for seeing through their portion of the production with the limited hands at his disposal. One departments output is the input of the other and standardization is needed. This also presents a requirement for departmental review Such a studio is required to develop a pipeline which can be used over several projects of often similar nature.

The second observation of note is that the assets processes are placed separately from the movement and imaging section of the production. This actively facilitates an episodic production where the assets may be finalized once and may be used repetitively inside episodes after relatively.

Type of Projects

Types of Projects

Type	Animation	Live Action	VFX
Short	✓		✓
Episode	✓
Feature			✓

Animation vs VFX and Live Action

VFX projects are different from animation projects because of their requirement for photorealism. While photorealism brings a certain standard for quality into play it also makes production complex because it is still difficult to achieve.

Production wise it is different because of the dependance on plates i.e. the footage from shooting of live actors or environments. This shifts the focus towards post production as the goal is convincing integration of the plates with the VFX. This means that much of the work is dictated by the look of the final blended frame and many assets may just be 2-Dimensional in nature. This entails a need for fluidity towards the end of production in the hands of the compositor while any rigidity introduced by 3-Dimensionally synthesized assets should primarilly cater for that need.

Episodic vs Feature and Shorts

Although animation productions whether Episodic or Feature length will have the same type of skill required from its artists but their production cycles especially related to asset development will differ.

Episodic projects will have assets created once per many episodes or production cycles. Most assets are produced without the knowledge of the role in the script and many times they are used again without many changes across episodes. Moreover, many versions of the same asset may be required in different productions in parallel. While this scenario might be a source for complications, it also provides opportunities for more reuse and thus increased efficiency in utilization of the asset team.

Assets in Shorts and Features on the other hand maybe tinkered with deep into production. Many assets, especially sets and environments, may only be used in once or sequence and thus may constantly require improvements even after being brought into productions, blurring the boundaries between assets development and production processes. This is the reason why we may not find a lot of emphasis on this distinction with shops who are focused on features.

Nebula Pipeline gives importance to the boundaries between asset development and production as it provides an opportunity to formalize handing over of tasks downstream. It also recognizes the requirement for supervisor review and approvals these points.

Timely reviews and approvals will limit redoes to a small stage in pipeline and result in a more efficient production cycle even in a feature scenario. This might mean that an asset becomes less modifiable down stream in production, and thus dictates the need to finalize them before being used in production.

Environmental Effects vs Character Effects

Effects that introduce real complexity into a production are the 3D effects that involve physical simulation. To deliver these convincingly requires focused expertise and capable hardware, this is the reason they are expensive.

The software that are required to do these tasks integrate into the pipeline through use of common formats such as fbx and alembic, and thus make the task trivial on the outset. Moreover, the small number of jobs seen alongwith the involvement of the major amount of effort to execute the task itself, it is difficult to lockdown a common strategy of dealing with it.

Character Effects such as cloth and hair simulation on the other hand are recurrent and more fundamental to the asset development process and the production pipeline. The pipeline needs to adapt to the requirements of such effects across all asset and production phases. The tools currently leave space for character effects by allowing multiple geometry sets and standardizing exists only for hand-animated geometry. However, there is room for automation here if such protocols can be agreed upon.

Deployment Architecture

The pipeline deployment comes between the users and the Network Attached Storage. The degree of completeness of the pipeline is inversely related to the number of times users need to manually access the data in the Network Attached Storage

Deployment Architecture

The Nebula Pipeline makes use of the Tactic CMS to manage its database and to provide production tracking.

Required Software

The pipeline tools require the following software to run

• Windows OS

• Autodesk Maya

• Redshift 3D

• The Foundry Nuke

• The Foundry Hiero

• Thinkbox Deadline

• Southpaw Tactic Open Source

• FFMPEG

• Image Magick