Design of maya-based cgi pipeline

[cire]

Hi there. Im putting some time doing research on the design of a cgi pipeline with maya as the core software. Anyone here done this before? Some of the stuff that I need to know includes the integration of an asset management system into the pipeline, the tools that are used to sort of glue the pieces of the pipeline together and maybe a bit of the underlying principles, if there's any, that serves as guide when designing a cgi pipeline. Also, if anyone could provide a link to any site on the web which could provide some valuable info on this, id really appreciate it. Thanks!

[joojaa]

Well id say ateast 1/4 orf the people here have designed their own pipeline and allmost all are up to maintaing their own on perosnal projects

What exactly in this si so perplexing?

assets are files wich include textures, modells and such... save them on disk, prefeerably a server so everyone can acces it. It might be that you want to use some file management software on this to automate verison controll finding of stuff etc. At easiest this is just a plain disk with some directory sttructures and naming conventions on top. You can go as fancyt as you like but theres nothing realy facy to it even if you complicate it to the extreme. Such as offering a aui fro doing it wich makes it a push button solution for the user and a nightmare for the eytem admin. Basicaly any literature with topic on asset management, storahge or documentation systems decribe this deeply. Even a amanual on how to store physical things cover most of this.

As for the glue, whell theres a lot fo it. Somne are pure sytemm admin sutuff, such as making backup of important files. other are more prcise such as what image formats to use and where to store them.

Then theres how to cue your renders so that servers keep curning alot. And maybe how to build delatyed read archives and how to filter the data before renders.

You might even need soem strategy on how to slap two animation sdoen by 2 different animators to gether by script.

So could you be a BIT more precice. Id hate to go trough every piece of computer science stuff ever developped. Becasue a good 3d pipe prettymuch covers it all.

[cire]

well...
how about the use of maya referencing? Do studios which employ a pipeline use maya referencing? Or do they use other methods?

[joojaa]

Sure! But only for stuff that needs interaction.

But personaly we have gone to doing this at rendertime with ribfilttering and isnerting slow archives or using slow ribgens. Since usualy the most references dont need to be shown anyway untill in the final image.

Same applies to using mental ray where i just reference the underlying backgrounds with custom mi text and include statements (note they wont render untill you do a batch render!!).

[cire]

well... for starters I'd like to know some more how referencing is used to help in production. Do studios which employ a maya-based pipeline use maya referencing or do they write scripts to manipulate files and reltaed stuff?

[joojaa]

Well where i worked regferencing was used so that a) two people could be working on the same deal at once. so thet there was minimal clutter on screen and in file.

But sice its not possible to reference everything sometimes you must inject stuff into the pipe and sometimes you can jsut rely on the references themselves.

But yeah all of the outlined methods were used depending on the situaation. Backgrounds and final shaders were generaly injected at rendertime into either the maya binary, or a mi file that was included or in the ribstream. Ity all depended on what renderer was used and what layer was to be rendered etc.

And above all what production was in question! Se mostly all different projects had DIFFERENT pipes, altough in general much the same. Older productions had cruder pipes than newer ones.

I mean piror to maya 5 we didnt reference ANYTHING everything was injected into the maya ascii stream.

[cire]

ive used referencing before but not in a studio setting but on a personal project. Anyway, you mentioned some stuff that i didnt quite get. what do yo mean by backgrounds and final shaders being injected into the maya binary at rendertime? Can you elaborate a bit more on how this is done?

[joojaa]

Se you can order maya to concatenate two files in 5 different ways.

Easiest is to concatenete 2 maya ascii files, however its slightly more effeicient to do this witha binary file because it reads in a bit faster (wich means the data can be handled slightly more efficent in binary mode), its not that much more ailien to work with than a ascii tough. So basicaly what you do is you cut the scene description part of the second 2 binary file and cat it in to the other file just before the end statement. All you need to do is make a nice command line tool for you to take 2 files and cat them, thisway you never need to deal with clutter.

Or if you dont want to do a tool like this you can use the you can just add them together like this:

mayabatch -batch -command "file -import "file2.mb"; file -rename "file3.mb"; file -save -type "mayaBinary";" file1.mb

note i didnt actualy test this (no maya to test on) it might have a slight typo, because i wrote it out of memory. Proble with this is that it does use a lic of maya so the externel prg is sligtly more usefull. As a alternative you could do this withe injection in the pre render mel.