Animation workflow, pipeline, asset management & production control.

Plumber is an asset-based production system For Maya 8.5 up to 2011. Currently Plumber has only been certified as a Windows-based tool, butthey  hope to certify it soon for LINUX. The Professional version costs 120 $ per seat, the Amateur version is 45 $ Completely GUI based. Work collaboratively with shared asset libraries, simple department switching, and concise shot management tools. An asset-based system, Plumber automatically organizes models, puppets, characters, sets, and props. Easily integrate pre-existing tools, unique procedures and custom scripts into the Plumber system. Plumber utilizes big studio pipeline methods.

It seems Disney is  going to open source part of its I+D, by opening Partio:  " The goal of Partio is to provide a unified interface akin to unified image libraries that makes it easier to load, save, and manipulate particle files ". Right now it supports " Houdini's GEO and BGEO, Maya's PDB and PDA, RenderMan's PTC " but it is not available to download for now. The reason to go Open Source seems to be because they " would like to collaborate to design the appropriate format in the context of open source " for a future " efficient cached and ordered format that allows nearest neighbor searches without an initial KD-Tree search and also can have only part of the particle set in memory at once "