Animation 'xpress had inaugurated its 'Ask
The Expert' series
in Issue 61 dated Spetember 1 2005. We began
with Technical Director VK Gupta presently working
at Berliner Film Companie., Berlin, Germany.
Gupta had specified Pipelines as
the topic on which readers could mail questions.
Following are the answers for the first edition
of 'Ask The Expert'.
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Query posted by Richard C. Lewis,
Executive VP / COO, PipelineFX, LLC (USA)
 |
Q."Given
your experience as a Pipeline Technical Director,
what are the biggest challenges you face managing
render farms?"
V
K Gupta. To my experience there were no
"Major Challenges" managing render
farms, with availability of software like Cube,
Muster, Rush, Mental Images etc which are evolved
and have addressed the major to minor management
issues. The prime focus lies on "Performance"
rather than "Management" now. Most
of the studios in India have large number of
workstations rather than render farms. The challenge
is in using the idle resources on the workstations
along with Render Farms. The peak performance
of the workstations is rarely reached with the
kind of tasks most of the artists handle. The
idle computing power on the Workstations has
to be made resourceful. Hopefully "Grid
computing" or "Distributed batch processing"
evolve and get integrated into rendering solutions,
this can be useful, where small studios or even
individuals could afford acces to Pixar-like
render farms.
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Queries
posted by Ashish Dantu, 3D Tech artist, FX Labs,
Pvt Ltd, Hyderabad
Q.What
is the key purpose of a Pipeline. How do you
define a pipeline and what should / should'nt
be the focus areas while addressing a pipeline
and its functionality?
V
K Gupta. I need to make few things clear.
First and foremost Pipeline is not a tool or
a software. It's a concept. It's like an Architect's
blueprint to build a house. Without a well defined
pipeline, the production will not have a proper
road map.
Asset Management is just a process in the Pipeline.
Even Plugin development or Scripting will be
deemed as pipeline processes. It is difficult
to say what should or should'nt be a focus area
while addressing a pipeline, as the Pipeline
has to address every aspect of production. A
pipeline has to address all aspects of content
creation.
Important
note: A well designed pipeline can make even
the most complex art simple to produce. A badly
designed Pipeline can make the most simple art
complex to produce.
Q.How
much and which areas do you think the pipeline
can / should automate an artist's workflow ?
How does it help?
V
K Gupta. You can automate virtually anything
in the workflow. The most important input for
Automation is that one needs to know whether
a task is redundant or not. Some times an Engineer
might get carried away with automating every
task but end up spending more time in developing
rather than the actually using the tool.
As a TD or Architect you should be able to predict
or foresee the problems or issues which might
create a bottleneck for the production and address
them. Automation is all about removing redundancy
in tasks.
Q.
Is a pipeline part of a 3D software package
or are pipelines independent of packages?
V
K Gupta. It is not limited to a software
or a process.
Q.
How different is a feature pipeline from an
episodic pipeline or from a game development
environment ? Or can a pipeline be designed
to handle various teams to work in the same
time ?
V
K Gupta. One cannot differentiate between
a feature pipeline and episodic one or short
film. A Pipeline is designed for 2D production
or 3D Production or VFX but not Feature or episodic
way. Almost every process will be eventually
be same in 3D Production. But the significant
difference in the design is that the emphasis
on Asset Management, Reuse of Assets and MIS
will be found in episodic pipeline.
In a feature Pipeline the pressure on production
will shift from one process to other smoothly
and as the production matures the previous processes
will become inactive. In an Episodic style of
production the pressure on all the process will
be active until the total series is delivered.
Q.
Are databases (Access or Oracle) an integral
part of a pipeline ? How can one connect to
these databases from within Maya ?
V
K Gupta. It depends on how complex or simple
you want to design your pipeline.A complex approach
could be that you can connect to ODBC by developing
a plugin in c++ which will talk to both the
Database and MAYA Application. A simpler approach
would be using the web browser in Maya and write
a web based solution which can talk with databases.
I'm giving two examples just to show the difference
between complex and simple approach.
Q.
In the presence of software like AlienBrain
(asset management software), how much do you
think is the requirement for a customized pipeline
? What are the areas that an asset management
software fails to address, while a pipeline
can ?
Alien Brain does not or Intend to define
a Pipeline. As you said It's an Asset Management
Software or a Tracking software. You need to
customize Alien Brain to suite your Pipeline.
Sometimes the decision of going for a software
like Alien Brain will be part of Pipeline Planning.
Q. Does a pipeline based on Maya involve
API usage too ? And if so, to what extent ?
Can you sight any examples ?
V
K Gupta. API
is for extending a software's capabilities.
Q. What are the common requirements
of a long-format 3d animation process, which
can be addressed through a pipeline, to increase
the efficiency and ease of work for the artists
?
V
K Gupta. Re
Use
Q. Does a pipeline work best in a
client-server model or can it be a broken system
too ?
V
K Gupta.I prefer Object Oriented design
to anything else.
Q.
After a pipeline is setup and being used in
a production setup, what do you feel can be
the 'maintainance' part of it ? What areas of
a pipeline are prone to failure and how can
one avoid them ?
V
K Gupta. It
clearly depends on the design of the pipeline.
In object oriented design it narrows down the
errors or failures and will be manageable. In
my experience most of the problems or issues
arise due to Human errors rather than technical
failures. In fact, building efficient pipelines
will drastically reduce Human Errors. One more
important task would be making the artists understand
the pipeline and how it works. You should always
try to make it as simple as possible, rather
than complicating it.
Q.
What is the scope of technical team (R&D)
in the present indian animation industry ? How
can a R&D department help production cycles
?
In
my opinion currently the hottest issue in Indian
Animation Industry is about Trained Artists.
The industry is looking for various approach
to address this problem. To my opinion this
problem can be address this only by focusing
more on Pipeline teams. Industry needs more
TD's than Artists now. Pipeline teams can make
production very efficient and will increase
the deliveries/output from each artists. For
example the statistics show that Toy Story or
Finding Nemo had more TD's than Artists in the
production. One has to remember that if we are
on a 3D production it has a lot to do with technology.
Technology doesn't limit to building networks,
maintaining Hardware or Render Farms which are
Infrastructure Issues. Pipeline will focus more
on Process with an Idea on every aspect production
and infrastructure.
No
software can address the creative desires of
screen writers and directors. Their imagination
in the storytelling will keep challenging the
software and will push them to the next level.
The scope of R&D will be there as long as
the screen writers are imaginative.
Most
importantly Time is the most important aspect
here. No body wants to wait for next version
release of any software to address an issue.
Every software provides a very good API library
and a scripting language today. This clearly
shows what kind of challenges 3D productions
handle now and the need for programing next
level tools.
