Animation workflow, pipeline, asset management & production control.

This is an XSIBase interview to Diego Garcia ( Blur ), it might shed some more light onto the matter. Diego is answering questions (including mine) at a "know the artist" thread in cg-channel.com (in spanish)! And another interview to Graham Clark partly related to pipeline creation, that might give some interesting conclusions.

3d Short Film Production is a book about the steps to follow to create an animated short film: History, preproduction, file nomenclature, tools, and all subsequent steps. It is very interesting and it can possibly help you

I asked for ideas and suggestions in a 3D users forum, and Luisma sent me his own personal opinions about the matter of workflow and pipeline. This is a resume, loosely resumed and poorly translated by me, and with my own comments in italics . Luisma´s comments are from the point of view of a mere user, as he is not a programmer nor an expert. Also he is considering a type of production with several departments that will be exchanging or sharing assets most of the time, both internally and among departments, each using its own programs and tools, so it is a rather heterogeneus system. An efficient pipeline will be mainly based on keeping an strict discipline regarding name conventions ( nomenclature ). This will make easier for everybody to: 1.- Find assets to work with. 2.- Keep track of the versions of each asset. 3.- To check and send assets along the pipeline to the next department. 4.- Facilitate writing scripts and programs that work with assets. This is mere common sense. Now le...

Miguel A.S. Cogolludo has sent me a good wealth of information he has been collecting lately: "Casually this is a subject that has caught my interest lately, and I have some links and files that might be of interest for you" "There is some people that started trying it, but I haven´t seen progress for some time, the Koji system". Looking into Koji two more projects are shown: celtx and otc "This are two essays about Final Fantasy : Tracking Assets and Developing a Production Tracking Database " "Another interview about the making of Final Fantasy" Zeno , the new system of ILM (registration required). And also in this three articles in awn: #1 #2 #3 Interesting discussion about workflow management in Framestore

In this chart (data from boxofficemojo ) you can see the films that have done (worldwide theatrical box office) above 200 million US$ after 1985 (Toy Story). Green dots indicate 3D movies. "Titanic" (1,845 Mill. US$) has been removed to gain detail. You can see that 3D movies between 1985 and 2002 perform between 350-550 Mill US$. Suddenly comes a top with "Finding Nemo" (2003, 854 Mill. US$) and "Shrek 2" in (2004, 920 Mill. US $), and right after that comes a severe drop, with some films performing under 250 M. Moving on to a more subjective analisys, I have a feeling that 3D movies are getting worse every year. This feeling comes from two factors: - There are too many 3D films per year lately. Until 2004 there were 1 to 4 films per year. Then the number rises steeply: 6 in 2005, and 11 so far in 2006 - Most of these films have no appeal at all: Aren´t you bored of "twin films" about "funny animals" (2 x ants, 2 x fishes, 2 x penguins...