Pipeline

Project Widow Pipeline Notes

This document is to help the workflow between parties involved with Project Widow. This is not a how to guide, nor is this intended as a rule book. There are certain instances where there should be rules and in those instances it will be mentioned however there will not be any reprimanding or anything of that nature. This is simply just to help the process from point A to point Z. Most of this document will be updated as this project gets more involved and progress is made, each stage will be worked on and documented here, from modeling to final render.

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Widow Pipeline

  • The Blender to RenderMan pipeline has successfully been tested for the first time in this short. Not complete yet but we did produce several thousand frames, from R+D to lighting tests.
  • This is being done over the internet, when this pipeline was designed almost 4 years ago this was not anticipated at the time so that brings up some very interesting issues.
  • Morpho Animation Studio in Costa Rica is using a similar pipeline that we currently help with tech support.
  • What else can be improved? What can make the whole process work better?
  • Other people have expressed interest in using this for their own purposes in the future. This gives us a chance to stress test this so that they are aware of the methods, complexity and potential problems.

So far the pipeline has performed quite well considering that the majority of this pipeline test has not been done before on this scale. Procedures that can be improved, already ideas have been added as well as removed from the pipeline.

Widow Pipeline II

The next gen pipeline is currently being developed so that Project Widow can continue to be the cutting edge of soho / DIY production pipelines. The older pipeline relied on older software and over the course of time development continued to evolve ALL the major components of the Widow pipeline, thus using the older technology would be less hassle, the leaps and bounds that the new pipeline has over the old is enough to evolve.

The project goals is now to incorporate the new Point based occlusion and illumination of the next release of Aqsis.

Also stress testing RIBMosaic and using the new stable Blender 2.58.


Stage 1.

  • Model Construction (Complete)
  • Storyboard Final (Complete)
  • R+D (ongoing)
  • Shader Development (ongoing)
  • Testing, development and implementation (Pipeline, Aqsis) (ongoing)

Stage 2.

  • Set Design (Complete)
  • Blocking Camera Angles (Ongoing)
  • Animation (STARTED)
  • Shading (Ongoing)
  • Lighting (Ongoing)
  • FX (includes cloth and web effects) (R&D)

Stage 3.

  • Create final preview sequences to send to NOYX Studios for audio completion.
  • Export final scenes to RIB into a directory linked to the Animux SVN
  • Clean up RIB with shell script 'postmosaic' which allows Dr.Queue to correctly distribute frames
  • Final Frame Render in 1080p HD resolution (1920x1080)

Stage 4.

  • Post Composite
  • Frame Sequences to Video
  • Video Editing (sequencing the shots and adding the final audio tracks)
  • Create final video for distribution (torrent, YouTube, Vimeo)

-TedG

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