Story telling aside, the more interesting aspect of this production was how extremely well the pipeline was set up. Apart from indecisive directors, producers and clients, who all affect the outcome of a project, the one thing that will decide whether your life will be a walk in the park or a living hell is the All Mighty Pipeline.

For outsiders and people just starting out in the industry the term doesn’t mean much but let me give an example. If you were assigned the task of transporting 100 litres of water from place A to B. Would you happily walk back and forth with a bucket until you filled enough or would you spend a few days first building an irrigation system that could transport the water to place B in a just matter of minutes? In small quantities it would probably be wiser to just use the bucket, but what if you were instead asked to transport 100.000 litres? It would be incredibly stupid to do this by hand and in the 3D world the exact same thing applies.

So what is an efficient pipeline? First of all it should be set up in a way so that the same task can be repeated hundreds of times without much user effort. Everything that is likely to be repeated more than twice should fall into the consideration of being automated.

All major 3D applications support scripting and you don’t have to be an expert at it either because most generic commands are instantly echoed in the command log. By simply running a cut ‘n paste operation on a series of commands you can instantly batch a command to be run hundreds of times!

Another issue that always springs up, when working in an environment with many artists, is naming convention. Everyone has his own great idea on how to name a file and if you combine everyone’s ideas at the same time you will end up with a toxic cocktail that gives you a hangover lasting much longer than the usual weekend.

Fortunately there is a very easy solution to this problem. Don’t allow the user any form of manual intervention. Everything should be handled through custom made tools that, behind the scenes, puts and names files in the correct place. Trust me, when a deadline approaches you will thank your mighty RenderGod that you organised your files in a good and efficient manner.

I saw this sign the other day when walking through Soho.
Everyone has the right to a little bit of privacy I guess…

I don’t want to brag or anything, but I had the honour to hold the Oscar for approximately 53 seconds in a rare photo opportunity. This was for the work undertaken by Cinesite on the Golden Compass movie.

How coOol is that?!

Hmm… ok maybe not that cool, but at least I now know that it’s not made of plastic.

As a matter of fact its damn heavy.

From a health point of view it is obviously good because fewer people would go out drinking, but it would spell a disaster for the balance sheets of the pub owners and also Soho would lose a lot of its charm.

If you are a London resident you can sign a petition on the governments website here:
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/SaveOurSoho/