Week 5
April 22, 2017
With only two days to spare this week, I made this development journal - a place for major milestones and weekly reports related to work with the pipeline.
I’ve gone ahead and added previous reports made to not leave anything out and invite you to read it through to really get a sense of why things look the way they are at the moment and in which direction we are headed.
Plan Ahead
Below you’ll find a snapshot of the plan as of this date.
Primary mission: Develop a pipeline covering major aspects of production at Mindbender in such a way that it may be modified and extended by the technical director.
Major Aspects
Workflows: Modeling, Rigging, Animation, Fx, Lookdev, Lighting, Rendering, Comp Software: Windows, Linux and MacOS, using Maya, 3ds Max, Nuke, Houdini and Photoshop.
Timeline
| Month | Involvement | Details |
|---|---|---|
| 1-2 | Full-time | 1 week/month on-site in Sweden. |
| 3-6 | Part-time | 1 consecutive week/month. |
| 7+ | Done | Technical director is able to handle things from here. |
Breakdown
| Project | Iteration | Description | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| VM | 1.0 | Identical workspaces for all | 5 days |
| Launcher | 1.0 | Manage project, environment and software | 5 days |
| Builder | 1.0 | Manage setup of shots and renders | 5 days |
| Approval | 1.0 | Manage what gets built | 2 days |
| Connector | 1.0 | Manage interactions between loaded assets | 5 days |
| Creator | 2.0 | Manage creation of new assets | 5 days |
| Publisher | 2.0 | Manage output | 10 days |
| Loader | 2.0 | Manage input | 5 days |
| Manager | 2.0 | Manage updates | 5 days |
| Sync | 2.0 | Manage locations | 5 days |
| TOTAL | 52 days |
Details
| Project | Description |
|---|---|
| VM | Investigate the possibility to host all software, including pipeline, within a virtual machine and distributing this both internally and externally to all artists. It would enable (1) an identical environment for everyone, (2) simplified setup for remote artists and (3) simplified updates and maintenance of environment. At the cost of (x) performance. Also investigate Paperspace, a “computer in the cloud” and the work involved in (1) getting that up and running and (2) actually using it in production. |
| Launcher | Replace mb.bat with graphical interface, including the creation of new projects and assets. (1) Login screen to capture user and notify on pipeline updates, (2) Project browser with thumbnails of assets, (3) Configure project and assets, e.g. start/end frame and fps, (4) Specific versions of software per-project, (5) Process management of launched applications and their life cycles, set and visualise environment at time of launch. |
| Builder | Automatically construct scenes with latest or approved assets. This includes importing the right animation caches for a particular shot, assigning look development and setting up render layers. |
| Approval | “Tag” assets with approved and enable building of latest approved shots. |
| Connector | Visualise possible interactions and enable custom interactions to be built by the on-site developer. Related: #73 |
| Creator | Implement templates. |
| Publisher | Setup QML and further validations. |
| Loader | Implement Asset Database and “make available offline” for browsing assets globally and without local availability of files. Visually, enable selection of version and representation. Visualise more metadata, including icon and/or thumbnail of assets. |
| Manager | Enable editing and connecting of containers. Support notifications of new published versions, including remote. |
| Sync | Integrate with the “make available offline” feature of Loader to synchronise assets on-demand. |