Pipi // The Visual Effects Pipeline

Pipelines
#21

Fantastic questions, Nysautro! I’m preparing the next part of my presentation to you guys (which is all about design and prototypes) which will answer some of those straight away, I’ll have that ready the coming Monday or Tuesday.

Till then, let me just pick a few of particular interest.

  • Do they have to learn something new or are you using things they already know?

This is one of the key areas of interest. Our industry, especially in commercials, is extremely freelance based and for each shop a freelancer enters he has to learn a new way of arranging things. A new way of communicating with his peers. And he’ll do the same beginners mistake each time, regardless of experience at other shops. What we’d like for Pipi, is for multiple studios to adopt this way of working so that freelancers are as familiar with the infrastructure of a studio as they are in the tools they use - Maya, Softimage, Nuke etc.

[COLOR="#FF8C00"]- What kind of support will there be when having problems with the API?[/COLOR]

This will depend on our business model. One of the topics we’ve gone through is whether or not to supply Pipi as free software with paid support, similar to how Red Hat Linux does with their subscription model. That way, anyone could adopt Pipi and those who are serious enough about its integration can bother with paying for support.

There will of course also be a community effort built around it. In addition, we were thinking of hosting a script sharing platform where users could share the tools they build off of Pipi. Shotgun Software’s Tank have built most of their Pipeline philosophy around this idea and I think is a solid one.

I’ll return with more in a bit! Keep up the good questions!

Best,
Marcus

#22

I am a bit afraid of your answer. I think every company would like to see their product as the standard and I do not think that attitude can be seen as a solution.
What I was aiming for with my question is “what softwares are you using as a reference to reuse usability from so user can directly feel comfortable and recognize the use of it?”
For example the layer system in photoshop, the layout of a certain program, the use of colour indication, certain icons, …

#23

This is true. But to this day, has anyone tried making a pipeline into a standard?

Things have changed too quickly and there simply was no straight shot of hooking up software to each other in the past. Python is fairly new to the scene and is one of the things I believe has changed the game in terms of consistency. I think this is an upcoming breed of software and just as shotgun has set the stage for artist collaboration in terms of feedback review, scheduling, task assignment and so on I believe the same could be done in the area of connecting software to one another.

Although true that software changes much more rapidly than people-habits, and people being much more predictable in terms of managing workloads (making it all the more straightforward to build around solutions that support it, like task-tracking which have many solutions available already in other fields besides cg) I see a trend towards certain basic elements in almost every production that I think could eventually be agreed upon given the right outset. The use of assets and the concept of publishing for instance. Some of the houses I visited have never heard of the idea, yet they did something just like it, albeit manually and slightly chaotic.

#24

Having said that, I completely agree with you that any new tool has to comply with the design standards of today. In fact, I think that goes without saying.

We belive in POLA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment

#25

I’ve put up a new thread regarding User Experience-related topics as this one is geared more towards higher-level concepts.

In here, I’d love to hear about what you guys think about how small studios could benefit most out of a solution such as Pipi. What would accelerate them without overwhelming them?

We were thinking of making a minimal version of Pipi that deals only with file handling and setting up the environment, so that users of Pipi could go directly to creating their own scripts using using the little extra information they would get. From there, we could easily adjust things based on feedback and eventually keep adding to the solution whilst making sure we’re headed in the right direction.

@nysautro: I’ll keep your questions alive in the other thread!

#26

I’m moving some of the more high-level discussions over to CGTalk, feel free to join in. I’ll return here once there’s more technology to discuss!