Animation workflow, pipeline, asset management & production control.

A  producer of two graduation short films just sent me an email: "We all know how complicated Shotgun is:  I found this Maya-centric project manager that looks awesome. Surely it´s not the mastodon that Shotgun is, but could be useful for the new short films, mainly to save the burden of setting all the craziness we have suffered" Main features are: Project organisation:   Folder structure and naming conventions. Version control: Saves and versions scenes and  playblasts. Team collaboration: Roles and permissions Last update was in February 2018, but Lior seems pretty fast to reply in the  feedback forum . Let me share some relevant information I´ve found in the web page http://pipeline.nnl.tv "The license is restricted to a single user - without any other limitations." The " Non-Commercial use only  with  Limited functionality "  Trial license is free The " Non-Commercial and Educational use only  -  Requires Ema...

The award-winning director Rodrigo Blaas, showrunner of Guillermo del Toro´s "Trollhunters", has created the first Light Field animated VR animated short film " One Morning ", a casual encounter with a robot bird in the middle of the wilderness with maximum fidelity and immersion thanks to Lytro Volume Tracer (Lytro VT). Until now in VR you had to choose between visual quality and freedom of movement: either you are in a locked position within a 360º pre rendered environment around you, or you have some freedom of movement around the set, but using a real time render that gives a lower quality. Lytro VT allows CG content to be rendered as a Light Field by combining multiple 2D renders from different camera positions within the view volume, combining the best of worlds: a high quality rendered environment that also allows you to move around for maximum immersion.

Simple Animation  is a ground breaking solution that allows to set up a virtual studio with artist tools, production tracking, storage and rendering farm, paying exclusively on the go, and accessing  talent anywhere in the world . The artists just need the basic physical interface: any low-end computer with his choice of display and mouse/digitizer, and a reasonable internet connection. Once securely logged into the system, they´ll have access to a complete virtual workstation loaded with any production software they might need (either free or commercial), a production tracking system, etc. just as if they were sitting at a brick and mortar studio. Artists don´t have to install or run any software on their own computer, in fact they can´t even download the assets locally: everything is running in Simple Animation server, and kept securely there. The possibilities are truly endless: - Imagine you need a super powerful workstation for just a few days to calculat...

Summus, the spanish leading rendering farm, will show its groundbreaking new product, "Simple Animation" at SIGGRAPH 2017 " The virtual cloud-based animation studio that includes hardware, software and a free complete animation pipeline. Easier, better, cheaper and worldwide. Join us on a time travelling experience and discover a revolution never reached so far in the animation industry. " Simple Animation website  is displaying a countdown finishing in August 2nd. Stay tuned for more info!

Nimble is a virtual collaborative animation platform on the cloud, via app streaming. That means no software installation, no file transfers, no hardware or operative system issues... Being software agnostic, you can use your favorite animation tools and then invite collaborators to join you on your 2D or 3D project creating and animating on a web browser: model, rig, texture, light, animate, render, composite, edit...  You will do your own budget and schedule-planning, get your own virtual studio running in minutes, and populate it with artists from around the world. You can even set up revenue sharing. They are in beta testing right now, with a first “Pilot Program” limited to a small group of invited guests and just premiered the first animated content to utilize the platform 'Animal Fact #164', at Siggraph 2016. Animal Fact #164 from Nimble Collective on Vimeo . Animal Facts #164 was created leveraging components of the Nimble Collective platform, going from s...

Just a link to this interesting article in AWN magazine about Cloud Rendering by Richard Lewis of PipelineFX (Qube!)

ARTELLA is (from their web) an attempt to "solve the complex challenge of building creative projects through distributed collaboration." by allowing anyone to set up his own virtual distributed studio, initially free, and soon on a low per user fee. I find the information in their web maybe too scarce, hopefully the video inserted below and this article in AWN will give you enough detail to get an idea: This video shows the creation of a 3D asset in Artella. Artella´s blog is also worth mentioning, with a plethora of posts related to the creative and organizational aspects of distributed animated content creation.

Although CGRU CG Tools Pack has been going on for over three years, it is gaining momentum since its latest release (2.0.7) last month. It is free, open source, and available on Windows, Mac and linux. The set of tools includes: " Afanasy " render farm manager " Rules " CG projects tracker which you can try online   " Movie Maker " scriptable image sequence encoder " Keeper " system tray icon. These are the features (from their web page) AFANASY Render Farm Manager   Flexible: JSON protocol, Python API. Farm Resources Monitoring: CPU (System,User), RAM, HDD, SWAP, I/O, Net and Custom (Python). Generic: Can do anything that can be described via commands. Statistics: SQL database and a ready Web GUI (PHP) to browse it. Multi-Task Hosts: One host can run several tasks. Multi-Host Tasks: One task can run on several hosts (master service and slaves). Software Licenses Limits. Dependences, Priorities, Services, Parsers, Wake-On-Lan...

Rajiv , a seasoned Effects Technical Director and Pipeline Developer just published version 1.0 of RenderBOX supporting Maya, Nuke, Houdini, Blender and After Effects. You can find more information here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRHr9iCMcgw Thanks for sharing, Rajiv! https://sourceforge.net/projects/mx-renderbox/

Marcus just announced that Buckshot 3.4 , a flexible way to track VFX projects using interconnected templates in Google, is now out of the paid preview and is free for unlimited projects. You simply need to fill this form to start using it! You are also welcome to check out the support community .

This new version includes the following features : Support for Reviewing Still Images . Now with higher resolution, pan & zoom, and improved color quality. Redesigned Overlay Player & New Image Attachment Viewer . Interface improvement. Support for Different Project Workflows (i.e. film, TV, games) on the same Shotgun site.   Smart(er) Thumbnails . New option to show the latest version to see how work is progressing. Powerful New Ways to Connect Your Data See more detailed information in their web .

I have just received this email from Don Parker of Shotgun Software: We’re excited to announce that we’re strapping a rocket to our backs and will be nearly tripling the size of our engineering team in an effort to build more tools for you, faster. How? We’ve signed a definitive agreement to join Autodesk, which is going to be making a massive, long-term investment in the vision we share with you for the future. You can get the full scoop on our website, but I want to give you the key points up front. First, Shotgun is not going away. We will continue to operate under the Shotgun brand with the same team and same style. Our website, forums, support site and team all stay in place. Second, we’re not going to slow down. We are scaling immediately to 2X our current team size and 3X development resources -- to go faster. Third, I’ll keep working for you as hard as I can as the leader of our larger team. The Shotgun crew you know and love are right here with me, and we’ll be joined by...

" Project Gooseberry is the code name for Blender Foundation's 5th Open Movie project, to produce a feature animation film using Open Source software " This is the Project Pitch:  http://gooseberry.blender.org/wp-content/themes/gooseberry/ You can also have a look at this interview with the director . They have two days left to reach the first 3000 supporters, and the reward is " to have full access to the whole production, while it develops "so why don´t you jump in and have a look?

David just shared this  white paper  in Linkedin,  enjoy! http://www.southpawtech.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/tactic_async_whitepaper_2014.pdf

Pablo just wrote about this interesting website about workflows and digital cinema equipment  http://www.wolfcrow.com .  In Pablo´s own words: "there are plenty of articles written with huge reasonableness, and away from the "spec whore" mentality found in the majority of webs". Readers of this blog might like to have a look at "VFX and CGI Workflows" ( http://wolfcrow.com/blog/vfx-and-cgi-workflows ). Have a look at the "About" section too, where you will find that the author, Sareesh Sudhakaran, lives in Mumbai, India, and that " Wolfcrow (or wolfkrow) is workflow spelled backwards. Yikes! "

Jeffrey Dates posted this recently in a newsgroups and h e kindly allowed me to repost it in this blog, you can check more stuff at his personal site  www.kungfukoi.com " So a short time ago, I was asked to give a 'boot camp' for some freshmen  and sophomore producers on what exactly happens during CG production.  Just  a basic, basic oversimplification of CG production with visuals. It went over really well, and sort of went viral around our studio. I just wanted to share with you guys. I hope you get a kick out of it also. http://kungfukoi.com/files/onset/CG_101.pdf Cheers, Jeff."

I just received a promotional email from Shotgun offering a 10% discount in this course , please let us know how the course went, if you attend. We've teamed up with the folks over at fxphd to offer a special course called  "Building a Modern Pipeline with Shotgun" . The class will cover topics like: Getting Shotgun setup at your studio Building a project, then scheduling tasks and tracking their progress Setting up a solid review pipeline Getting Toolkit setup and building your own apps Special talks featuring tips & tricks from real studios using Shotgun  Those taking the class will receive a special extended Shotgun trial for use during the class. Sign up today  using promo code "shotgun" and fxphd will graciously offer 10% off your fxphd membership. TM and copyright © 2013 Shotgun Software Inc.

One of the most relevant features in this version is that it now connects to your Google Drive to, for instance, create the folder structure for you, and it even offers a script for this called Buckshot v3.3 builder, which will be available for public use to assist you in building new projects for one week (until Mon14th of October 12pm PST) and after that you will have to wait for two months After almost 1 year of hard work to reach v3.3, Marcus is not going to make any more updates. It´s your turn: " Now go make something cool! " What does all this mean? Well, you better hurry up and get your own Buckshot v3.3 project now: http://links.vfx2.com/Buckshot-Build-v3 As Marcus says: " Make your life easier, and learn to use Google apps to manage your projects just like the big boys do. Here's my step-by-step guide on how you can set up your own professional project in just 12 mins. ". For more information, I´d suggest you to see this video  http://youtu.be/...

A few months ago I offered you the exclusive about  Buckshot free CG Project Manager , and  now, Marcus LeVere has just contacted me again with an even more amazing  project,  STUDIO.COOP , which  is (from their web) " a cooperative that enables creatives to develop, distribute and license their own intellectual property by crowdsourcing and profit sharing " treating " all of the collaborators fairly with a profit share ". Wow! You can have a look at the introductory 1 minute video to get a quick idea: And the I suggest you read the  Studio.coop Manifesto v0.1  and the about us   The official announce will be tomorrow, but remember you saw it in  3dresearch.blogspot.com  first! :-D Thanks again Marcus, best luck with this incredible project, and Keep Up The Good Work!

Transporter is a gigabit network disk that can "communicate and share files in a peer-to-peer fashion with computers and other Transporter devices located anywhere in the world. This ability eliminates privacy concerns, recurring fees, and all complexity associated with syncing files over the Internet". In other words: It is like having a (cloudless) 2 Tb Dropbox account without the monthly fee. Your data is not in the cloud, but replicates automatically among the selected devices. It is a tad expensive for me, I am just waiting for a small drop price to get my hands on a few of those. Has anyone had a first hand experience with it? http://www.filetransporter.com