Production Pipeline

My production pipeline is now in full swing for my short film, meaning I can press a few buttons and it spits out the composited video of the shot I'm currently working on. Its pretty important to have everything set up correctly to really streamline the rendering process, saving time to allow for focus on the final production frames. It's also much better for reviewing the animation, seeing one shot blend into the other, and seeing where the animation is needed most.

For each shot, I have the animation, environment, effects, camera, and lighting split into separate files, some of these files usually referencing other model and rig files elsewhere in the project. When working with multiple shots, it's pretty important to have some kind of pipeline for each element, so that when updates occur they update throughout the project automatically. I'll try and explain the setup here for what goes into each shot:

Character: SHOT <-- Lighting <-- [Animation, Camera] <-- Character <-- Rig <-- Model 
Environment: SHOT <-- Lighting <-- [Environment, Camera] <-- Model 
Effects: SHOT <-- Effects <-- Camera

To render each element, I have batch files in the shot folder to generate the renders on my render drive.

"C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2010\bin\Render.exe" -r mr -cam _CAM:camera1 -pad 3 -rd R:\KittyString\03_MURKY_DRAIN\02_UNDERWATER_SHOT\_LIT_ANIM _LIT_ANIM.mb  
"C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2010\bin\Render.exe" -r mr -cam _CAM:camera1 -pad 3 -rd R:\KittyString\03_MURKY_DRAIN\02_UNDERWATER_SHOT\_ENV _ENV.mb
"C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2010\bin\Render.exe" -r mr -cam _CAM:camera1 -pad 3 -rd R:\KittyString\03_MURKY_DRAIN\02_UNDERWATER_SHOT\_EFFECTS _EFFECTS.mb 
:: shutdown -s

shutdown -s is nice too! Command line rendering with Maya is pretty common - I only use it when I'm working with the shots in this project, as it tends to minimise any mistakes in render settings. You might notice the camera specified is _CAM:camera1; this lets me be lazy with my camera referencing, as the rendered maya file will probably have 3 or 4 referenced cameras in it, but only the one we want is used for rendering.

So the rendered passes for each element is split into folders, and then assembled in the compositor. I'm using Blender and so far its very handy. The great thing is its so lightweight and simple, so after a render from Maya, I can just fire up Blender and set it to work. I have different comp files for each shot, and one for each section, allowing me to easily turn a sequence of 'just rendered' shots into a quicktime file for previewing.

So far so good! I'll be sure to post some image updates soon.