pipeline development theory 2005-06-15 - By Bernard Lebel
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Here is my humble take on the matter.
See [Bernard] below.
xsibrad@(protected) wrote:
>I guess the question is: what do you folks in general consider to be under the
>realm of pipeline development?
>
>
Well, as the word "pipeline" implies, pipeline is all about carrying the
production from one point to another. To elaborate on such a shocking
revelation, the pipeline is the hardware and software structure that
will allow the data (3d objects, textures and all other assets you can
think of) to flow in a manner that is transparent to the users, flexible
enough to improvise and evolve (artists like to create "temp" models and
"test" scenes all over the place to get the job done), and rigid enough
so there is no "leaks" (lost data -> time -> money) and data can be
reliably tracked.
Therefore, pipeline development is, well, development to materialize
this idea, wether it is by design on paper, programming, 3d software
workflow, and education of artists. It generally comes down to
developing a global environment whose main function is to manage
saved/exported/opened/imported data. Well, data.
>I also thought about work that was started at R Greenburg and Associates back
in
>the day, that I believe has a life over at RhinoFX today. The basic theory
>being that Maya ASCII files are stored in a big CVS-like repository and spliced
>together on the fly. So one could theoritically commit just the lights from a
>scene to the repository. Then one could have the repository generate a scene
>that has the most recent characters, the animation from last week, and the
>lighting from yesterday morning. One could tweak the animation and then commit
>just the animation back to the regpository. Meanwhile, the riggers are fixing
>minor skinning issues. The next day, you update and pull the latest version of
>everything to your machine and do test renders. Its like a Maya aware CVS that
>has concepts of lights and characters and such, and can weave .ma files
>appropriately to make it work. In theory anyhow, I have not used it and I'm
>not sure if I'm making it out to be more than it actually is.
>
>Question: as far as the XSI world goes, is anyone doing stuff like this? Once
>a people pipeline has been established, are complex tools being written around
>the
>pipeline to the point that the production is centered more on a versioning
>reposiory and a database than on a "people maintained directory structure?"
Are
>these tools integrated directly into XSI?
>
>
>Question: In XSI land we don't really have the power of the ASCII based file
>format. And reference models are still rough around the edges. Does anyone
>think (or know for that matter) this kind of self weaving meta-data based
>pipeline technology is something that could be developed for XSI at this point?
> Or are we a few features and APIs short?
>
>All this stuff has been bouncing around in my head and I'm currious as to the
>actual state of affairs in the high end production world in XSI.
>
>
I don't see any reason why such a thing is not possible. Indeed we don't
have the ASCII paradigm (yet), but I think XSI offers all the necessary
tools for such an environment. The Omation example with XML is one. A
more "out-of-the-box" pipeline can use all the external files XSI
outputs (presets, material libraries, models, animation files, even
dotXSI), custom property sets, plugins, scripting API of standard
langages (that can interface with databases), COM/C++ API, spdls for the
reckless, Net View, the XSI project structure, and so on. Nothing
prevents one from creating parsers with its own custom ascii files.
With a strong structure, one can theorically rebuild an entire scene
with the click of a button, by gathering all files necessary and
organizing them in a way. In the medium term, this is in fact the road
we are following at Big Bang.
Reference models are indeed rough around the edge, but are a key
component of the "out-of-the-box" type of pipeline. In fact nothing is
quite perfect so far, but quite frankly, with the appropriate devoted
time, I think it's perfectly feasible.
Cheers
Bernard
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