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MillimeterUnification
Aug 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Cynthia Wisehart
DreamWorks visual effects supervisor Craig Ring noticed it; Darin Grant did, too (though he would as a pipeline guy): The Siggraph conference had not yet picked up on some of the key themes on the show floor — infrastructure, interoperability, and the “workflow” word.
The artistic process focus of the conference is entirely appropriate, and people like it. But when people go home to work, many of them are now preoccupied with issues that have little to do with the techniques and features of individual software tools.
Take Ring for example. As supe on Over the Hedge, he had the mixed blessing of being on the first DreamWorks show to implement the unified PDI/DreamWorks pipeline. Ring says he was among the supes at DreamWorks who believed in unification, even though it meant standardizing tools for artists who, in the past, had their pick. Not all his DreamWorks colleagues initially agreed, but Ring says that over many months of meetings, they hashed out a plan. It was pretty unavoidable. As Ring puts it, until recently, the needs of an individual show and the studio were mostly aligned because animated films were made virtually one at a time. But now, there may be up to half a dozen animated films in some stage of production at any one time, and with them, a large workforce to retain. So overhead and standardization become a way to prevent money and talent from leaking away with the ebb and deluge of production.
This highlights the double-edged sword of growth. Ring knows it's a drag for artists to have to learn new tools when they are so fluent in the ones they already know. Artists also think their skills are intertwined with their favorite software — and, to an extent, they are. But Ring suggests that a career in visual effects is supposed to be a continuous learning process; what makes artists good is what they see and can express, so most will be sufficiently driven by those skills to master the tools at hand.
There is so much to be said for a professional infrastructure from a business standpoint, especially as distribution options proliferate across multiple media. All studios — large and small — will be working on what unification means to them and they will be expecting the manufacturers and associations such as Siggraph to help them, as they did with the remarkable development of software and hardware of the past decade.
