EddieOffermann dot com

I've been working on the spec for Big Blue Ceiling and thought I'd share at least an introduction to what the project will deliver. I've changed jobs recently (still in the vfx software/pipeline/td world) and that, among other things, has interrupted the project a bit but I'm ramping back up on it now.

Below are some thoughts on what a pipeline is and how I envision Big Blue Ceiling.  There is so much more to say, but much of it will have to remain unsaid until the project is closer to launch. I believe it will change the world and transform how and where we do business.

What is a visual effects pipeline?

A vfx pipeline is a collection of tools, processes and standards that permit and ensure the following:

-    Efficiency of communication of assets

o      Models

o      Animation

o      Camera data

o      Textures

o      Lighting information

o      Simulation data

o      and anything else necessary to assemble a given scene

-    Standardization

o      Filenames

o      Storage hierarchy

o      Version management

o      Tools

-    Show, Sequence and Shot Management

o      Structure

o      Dependencies

o      Assignment and Evaluation

A formal visual effects pipeline in a traditional effects house serves to automate the transfer of data by abstracting it. Separating camera characteristics, lens and movement data, from its strict representation inside the software package. Treating models, rigs and animation and separate elements that can be updated individually: for instance, animation may begin before a character design is finalized and the models updated on the fly, per shot or across the entire show without losing the animation data or requiring a complicated manual process to transfer that animation onto the updated model or rig.

On the compositing side, it may involve providing an additional set of facility-wide tools that standardize certain effects or provide a particular look.  Tools for grading and color management may be developed for the facility or the particular show and distributed between the artists to ensure that different compositors are able to deliver visually similar shots with minimal headaches.

For the entire facility, a formalized pipeline will ensure that assets and media are located with predictable names and stored in standard locations, along with maintaining project history and asset version information. If the last animation, the last comp, or last week's version of a model are preferable, it's easy to return to that version - often this can be made to happen at the level of producers without having to send the shots back to an artist to make the necessary adjustments.

What then is a cloud-based visual effects pipeline?

With the emergence of cloud computing, many common applications are moving onto a new platform: instead of being contained by a conventional desktop operating system or local server infrastructure, they are being moved onto platform-agnostic, internet-based hosted application clusters. Popular examples that many users are familiar with are such services as Google Docs, the office suite provided online as part of Google’s service offerings, or Photoshop.com, Adobe Corporation’s online photo editing and gallery hosting service. Medical information, insurance software, procurement & fulfillment systems, and tons and tons of software development have all left localized corporate infrastructures and moved onto the Cloud.

For visual effects and other CG projects such as animated features or game development, the process is a little more complicated. It’s still impractical to move software like Maya, 3D Studio Max or Houdini off of workstations and onto a web-based platform. Pipeline management has been complicated by the sizes of files that are often involved, but more recent developments in existing internet infrastructure have brought fast broadband into the range of slower local area networks, opening up the option of intelligent management and delivery of data by software such as Big Blue Ceiling. While many facilities are hesitant even to share projects with other facilities because of the combination of file transfer times and manpower overhead involved in delivering hard drives or preparing data before and after manual transfers over FTP. A Software-as-a-service or cloud-based system such as Big Blue Ceiling handles the typical database and project management aspects of a traditional in-house pipeline, as well as managing data for effortless transfer between facilities or between facility and remote artist.

What is a “Software as a Service” solution?

Software as a service (SaaS, typically pronounced 'sass') is a model of software deployment whereby a provider licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand. SaaS software vendors may host the application on their own web servers or upload the application to the consumer device, disabling it after use or after the on-demand contract expires. The on-demand function may be handled internally to share licenses within a firm or by a third-party application service provider (ASP) sharing licenses between firms.

What is Big Blue Ceiling?

Big Blue Ceiling is a special subcategory of SaaS solutions referred to as SaSS (Software as a Secure Service). Software as a secure service (SaSS) is a derivative of software as a service. SaSS denotes a class of software as a service which emphasises security, not only in the link to and from the service, and the storage of any content by the software providing the service, but also in the security of the user in terms of the ability to make consistent backups and restores of any data stored in the service, in a non-proprietary format. In other words, security in transmission, storage and control over the user's own data.

In the context of a Cloud-Based Visual Effects Pipeline Software-as-a-Secure-Service, Big Blue Ceiling is a method of providing the sort of sophisticated visual effects pipeline normally restricted to larger, established visual effects houses, not only enabling it to be used by smaller studios but at the same time decentralizing it in such a way that it is as efficient for a group of broadly spread artists working in different locations as it is for a tightly integrated team of artists in a centralized studio.

Why would I be interested in a cloud-based, software-as-a-service solution for my visual effects pipeline?

The traditional rationale for outsourcing of any IT system involves applying economies of scale to the operation of applications, such that a service provider can offer better, cheaper, more reliable applications than companies can themselves. Several important changes to the way people work have made the rapid acceptance of cloud-based solutions possible and these changes are even more notable when we consider the visual effects community.

I.               High performance computers are widespread: Most cg & visual effects artists not only have a home computer but have one capable of performing functions far in excess of the basic needs of checking email and consuming online media.

II.             Processing power is a commodity: In the vanishing past, innovations in hardware were considered strategic advantages. From optical printers in the analog days to the first digital to film transfer processes of the TRON era, for many years hardware was king. More recently, proprietary applications and software tools were viewed as strategic. Today, people know it’s the business processes and the data itself: customer records, artist techniques, pricing information, and good effects design. Computing and application licenses are cost centers, and as such, they’re suitable for cost reduction and outsourcing.

III.           “Insourcing” pipeline systems requires expensive overhead including salaries, health care, hardware, software and OS management, liability and physical building space: not to mention unproductively reinventing the wheel!

IV.          Applications have tended to standardize: with a few notable exceptions, most people spend most of their time using standardized applications. A handful of standard 3d software packages dominate the market and they’re capable of exchanging data in a small set of standardized exchange formats. This means that a comprehensive solution for managing digital assets will work for a wide range of projects and facilities. Purpose-built, facility-specific pipelines should be regarded as dinosaurs.

V.            Web systems are incredibly reliable: Despite sporadic outages and slow-downs in the past, most people today are more than willing to use the Internet as a critical component of their business. As of early 2010, the visual effects community is behind many other information-related industries in moving out of centralized work clusters and into the cloud, largely because there has been no sound approach to managing the complex assets and often considerable data transfers involved.

VI.          Security is sufficiently well trusted and transparent: Secure communication no longer requires a complicated VPN setup or, worse, leased lines. Confidential client data can be handled even remotely with little risk.

VII.        Bandwidth of wide-area networks has grown drastically following Moore's Law (more than 100% increase each 24 months) and is reaching the bandwidth of slow local networks. Added to network quality of service improvement this has driven people and companies to trustfully access remote locations and applications with low latencies and acceptable speeds. Additional layers of asset data management by Big Blue Ceiling additionally boosts apparent speed of access while boosting quality of the artist experience.

VIII.      Cloud-based “Software as a Service” solutions have the effect of democratizing software, allowing small and medium businesses to have access to functionality formerly the domain of large enterprises. Big Blue Ceiling provides pipeline services at a level that small and even midsize companies could never afford to develop on their own, with a continually evolving set of tools and features unmatched even by in-house proprietary systems.

Who can benefit from Big Blue Ceiling?

Simply put, nearly everyone!

An entirely centralized studio can use Big Blue Ceiling and continue working as a centralized facility, leaving ongoing pipeline development to the Big Blue development team, regularly rolling out new features, support for additional packages and powerful artist tools, while letting the studio focus on creativity and project execution. And that centralized studio can rest easy knowing that if they need to expand, open up other locations, or cooperate on projects with artists and other facilities around the world, a set of tools are already in place for them to make sharing data completely effortless!

Smaller, newer facilities, perhaps formed just to accomplish a single project such as an animated short or independent animated feature can benefit enormously from a convenient slip-on pipeline like Big Blue Ceiling. It’s low entry cost provides world-class effects facility capabilities at a budget that nearly any production can absorb. Your cost savings just in artist hours transferring files and maintaining versioning, will easily exceed the entry cost of the service for small projects.

Loose collectives of artists will benefit from the Big Blue toolset as well, whether they’re seasoned industry professionals working purely for the love of the art or students collaborating on a project, access to the class of data management tools provided by Big Blue Ceiling should easily catapult any group’s efficiency.

Mid-size and larger facilities will find the toolset handy not only for their in-house work but for the ability to quickly and easily add artists in remote locations, or to easily permit secure access to their assets and production database by producers and vfx supervisors who may be offsite.

Additionally, tools that monitor times to complete tasks are able to chart them against production cost estimates, easily indicating unexpected burdensome cost centers, suggesting areas that estimates might be adjusted or manpower requirements reconsidered to adjust schedules. These are benefits that very, very few pipelines can provide, even in large established facilities.

I was talking to a friend today about what I'm doing with regards to managing data through an animation pipeline using XML. The more I work with it and the farther I get into the project, the more flexible and powerful the whole thing seems. Of course the goal to doing the implementation in Python is that virtually every software package in the vfx industry is python-friendly - so once the core routines are written, everything from Nuke and pyShake (the python plugin for Shake - if you haven't seen it yet, check it out here) to Maya, Houdini and RealFlow will be able to make use of them. I think most places are doing that these days, with a few nods to TCL/tk here and there - but broadly supported scripting languages are King and open description formats like XML are Queen.

My friend marveled at how nice it would be if one day, a couple years from now, everything was able to talk that smoothly: that a character animated in Maya could be pulled into Houdini, for instance, as something other than an OBJ sequence or a separately rigged character that you had to tediously (or with a lot of specific coding) link to exported channel data.

I wonder if that interoperability thing will ever extend beyond each individual studio's implementation. Everybody has a way of getting software to talk amongst themselves, some solutions being more elegant than others, but when you invest in creating something as elaborate as this it becomes your own proprietary tool. If you develop a tool that an animator can take an animated character with a complex rig on it, arbitrarily select additional elements that were never *really* meant to be animated and animate them anyway, and the modeling team can modify the model and issue a new version of it - and the animation gets seamlessly transferred over to the new model, even able to be read into RealFlow, substituting a different set of low poly independent objects that are driven by the data in that XML file: you don't put that pipeline tool on the internet for everyone to download for free.

That tool becomes your secret weapon. As a studio with an investment in a powerful and unique proprietary tool, even charging for it may not mean as much to you as the edge you gain during the heat of production.

Being XML based and implemented in Python does put my current project a wee bit closer to being an open standard, though. Even Shake will take Python scripts now - and they're really powerful in it and getting more so as development continues. The readability thing for XML is a gigantic plus, and the way it represents data is great. I can build a module that will write out the translation of a locator in both world and local space, as a baked set (every frame has a value) and as a set of keyframes (values only for those frames where the value was explicitly set by the artist), as well as screenspace UV values - so the same XML file could reconstruct a scene for a lighter to light and render from or another animator to tweak the animation curves, or for RealFlow to drive low-poly proxy objects with to disturb a drifting mist, or for a compositor in Toxic to link an effect to. And it's all one XML file - not a half dozen formats (often multiple versions of each) and a hundred-unit sequence of geometry exports.