3D Production Pipeline

Production Pipelines are an extremely crucial part of an animation workflow. In the industry we are currently in, production workflows difffer from one organization to the other, but the basic concept of running a pipeline remains the same. The kind of production pipeline that would be suitable for each group depends on each members' strengths and weakness, and that's what we have to analyze to evaluate ourselves too.

During one of Rashed's class, he gave us a good insight into how industry production pipeline workflows function. According to how he explained it, the basic low poly character with rough areas for joints are given to the rigging artist who makes the rig based on that low poly version, who then gives it to the animator to start animating the actions. While all this is simultaneously happening, ‘you’ as a modeler will be refining the high poly details onto the character. This means that you cannot alter the joint areas as every other task in the pipeline will be affected. This is also why an animatic HAS to be the final rough low poly version of the actual final film because the animator needs to know the timing and pacing of shots, while other placeholders need to be given sufficient screen time and space.

All this time, we were under the impression that an animatic is just a basic start to what our final films should look like. Instead, it should only be the low poly version of the final film, which will later be replaced with high poly models. To broaden my understanding, I did a lot more research into the different production pipeline workflows that exist in various companies. Here’s what I found:

Different production pipeline workflows

For a solo/small group project making an animated movie for the first-time, they would customize their workflows to suit their strengths. So here is one pipeline workflow which gives a breakdown of the different folders and arrangement/organization of work.

Production pipelines by big animation studios in the industry implement similar strategies but involve a lot more in between stages. The basic pipeline of pre-production is usually the same, but there might be differences in the production and post-production stages depending on the type of project and artistic style. Here is a great video, very entertaining and attention-grabbing and quite informative as well. I personally didn’t know there were other minor roles within production pipelines such as these mentioned in the video.

Lastly, this has to be the best thing I have ever watched. I watched the movie when it had just been released and completely fell in love with the entire film for its emotionally creative story, its uniqueness and creativity and the number of people who worked on a single film! This video, nonetheless, made me love Into the Spiderverse even more! Since this new artistic style pioneered its way into the animation industry - completely changing the direction in which animation films can go - their production pipeline involved a lot of cheats, technical and artistic developments and modifications, and overall a whole new spin on where animation could be taken to. Because of this, I would also like to work on a personal project model of Gwen Stacy from the film in the same art style using ZBrush and 3D Coat for the first time.

Therefore, these are some of the important production pipelines implemented in the industry. They involve majority of the same elements but a slight differentiation based on the project the are working on. We will also be adjusting the rigid pipeline to suit our strengths.