VFX A CHANGING LANDSCAPE

Patrick Wolf

Head of Pipeline Pixomondo

© 2013 Pixomondo

Challenges in a global environment

Pixomondo: 12 branches, 660+, 5 countries, 6 zones, 24/7 Challenges:

tracking distributed projects exchanging data ensure usage of standards and tools bridge environmental differences (software, hardware) deploying tools utilize remote resources not drowning in tickets!

© 2013 Pixomondo

Solutions Naming conventions: file, object, farm, shotgun … Prioritize on base tool set:

3dsMax, Maya, Nuke, Shotgun, Deadline, RV Communication platform wiki, helpdesks Infrastructure:

shared APIs for TDs to build on mount points, file structures, caches

Enrolling software vendors to evolve products for production needs

© 2013 Pixomondo

Historic Tool Deployment 0.1

Deploy locally

Test

Zip

Transfer

Unzip

Test

x12 branches

x… fixing individualissues

© 2013 Pixomondo

Tool deployment 2.0 SVN as Version Control System Tracks changes and provides detailed log Dev: Engineer/TD work/debug locally Bin: Released tools,

up to date copy checked out in each branch Artist / Farm alike depend on Bin Source code as asset - indexed and searchable

© 2013 Pixomondo

Tool deployment 2.0

SVN

dev

TD

Nuke Max Maya

Engineer

Transfer Proxy Generation Shotgun

bin

tools / deadline

LAX YTO FRA SHA …

x1 commit

© 2013 Pixomondo

Historic - Remote Render 0.1

Zip Scene Upload > Download Unzip Prep Farm

Env.

SubmitRenderRemote LoginQC Frame

Zip Upload> Download Unzip QC

Job

© 2013 Pixomondo

Solution - Remote Render 2.0

User Transparent submit, watch and check locally

Engine - in the background Submission per layer, frame bracketing, naming,

dependency collection, transfer, mapping properties, remote env. prep, rendering, notifications, transfer on frame completion, frame status sync, job cleanup

Provide scalability via SQS Distribute one job over multiple farms Future: Auto select farm based on criteria

© 2013 Pixomondo

Remote Render 2.0 for Artists

Submit Render

QCFrame

QCJob

© 2013 Pixomondo

References Aspera: http://asperasoft.com Celery: http://www.celeryproject.org Deadline: http://www.thinkboxsoftware.com DocFetcher: http://docfetcher.sourceforge.net SVN server: http://www.visualsvn.com/server SVN client: http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org Syncovery: http://www.syncovery.com UFTP http://www.tcnj.edu/~bush/uftp.html

patrick.wolf@pixomondo.com