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 "

As some of you might know, my company is working on a short movie. We have been invited to give a couple of speeches about it in Spain. These are the links to the details, in case you might be nearby: Sunday September 26th, 11:00, Animadrid Saturday October 16th, 18:00, 3DWire, Segovia Regards!

Hi. I have been keeping this blog for some time, and plan to keep on it as long as possible. I know there are not many places to find this sort of information (If you know of any, send it to me to be published!) Today I would like to ask for a small return from the readers. Free and very simple things. 1.- If you want a Dropbox account, get one free right now USING THIS LINK: https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTU1MjU3ODk  and help me get some aditional space on mine, with no cost for you. 2.- Do you see " all those messages by G00GL3 in this page that are not my posts "? Some people work hard to ellaborate them and put them there for you, and since most are closely related to the subject of this blog, surely you will obtain a benefit from visiting some of them now and then... and so would I! 3.- Visit these pages of my projects:  - The director´s blog about the short film I am working on . There is a brand new comic strip every monday for you (in spanish)!...

This is brand new from SIGGRAPH 2010. To sum it up in few words, it is a 3D render to exchange animated scenes between disparate softwares. "Alembic distills complex, animated scenes into a non-procedural, application-independent set of baked geometric results. This ‘distillation’ of scenes into baked geometry is exactly analogous to the distillation of lighting and rendering scenes into rendered image data." "Alembic Would Be Used... ...To bake the results of an animated scene for hand-off to lighting & rendering ...To hand off an animated creature for cloth or flesh simulation ...To store the results of a cloth or flesh simulation for use in lighting & rendering ...To hand off animated geometry to a physical simulation engine ...To store the results of a physical simulation engine for use in lighting & rendering"  

Anonymous kindly informed of PipelineTD "an interesting DAMS nicely integrated with Maya and has project planning, director approval tools with it". The author, Rahul Mishra, says in “I believe repetitive work should not be repeated, it should be automated.” That reduces human error and saves production time. This is what inspired me to develop pipeline-TD. The feature list is impressive, I am waiting to have some time to test it and report, meanwhile if any of you can do it, please report!

I was checking Render Mania and I found a post about  ( QUOTE ) " openSourceVFX.org website opened recently. This is intended to be a central portal of open source VFX projects (...) their goals include listing and presenting valuable open-source projects for the VFX community and giving a voice to OS project leaders and VFX pros to promote their work and keep us updated. "