Studio Art Pipeline Tools Question

[sev]

Having previously worked as a Technical Artist, I was hired an moved into a Software Engineering position that focuses heavily on DevOps. Over the years I have learned to use tools such as Docker, Ansible, Jenkins, etc. Moreover, I have currently been working with Kubernetes and AWS. I try my best after work to contribute back to TA.

Does anyone use cloud/containerization or configuration management tools for Technical Art? Just curious…

[Theodox]

Docker?

Hello all, Has anyone used Docker in production? We currently have quite a few web based tools (QA, baking, asset mgmt, etc.) deployed at different studios. Even with automated testing putting these services into production isn’t as easy as I would like. Docker promises to make it much easier, pretty much saying that “if it runs on your (dev) machine” it will very likely run in production. Deploying docker images that you just swap out also sounds quite easy, compared to manual deployment. So …

I think there is another discussion somewhere else too.

However most teams seem to be constrained by the difficulty of running gui apps off a container

[forest_3d]

I’ve been using AWS EC2 opportunistically for burst rendering (cinematics, broadcast graphics) and some data scraping. In general, I like to move any lengthy process off a users desktop and to a server, though our current pipeline doesn’t have too many bottlenecks of that nature. I’m slowly learning more about the DevOps way of doing things, and I have to admit, I love the approach.

[bob.w]

I believe we’ve been using some AWS stuff for our tools, text-to-speech comes to mind.

I’m still interested in the idea of being able to containerize application / project environments, but the support just doesn’t seem to exist for windows’ GUI applications.

[sev]

Thanks for the reply!

Strangely enough when I moved to “DevOps”, it felt like a logical jump from the Tech-Art - Pipeline work I was doing. for instance, using tools like RabbitMQ / Celery I looked at creating a full microservice pipeline where each service performs one action (baking, QC, etc) which was deployed with Ansible. I guess the difference is that we had a large pool of assets in our database (small art team).

The first tool I built using Docker was a web app that showed metadata from FBX assets stored in S3.
I am still very interested in how this evolves. The amount of variety in Technical Art is always exciting.

[Theodox]

Yeah – I think it’s basically “Docker works for machines and developers, for artists you need to install and config software”

Disk images are a pretty common solution, though they decay fast