Principles For a Successful Pipeline (2)

Welcome to this multipart series on principles for a successful pipeline. I hope it allows you to look at your own 3D and AI pipelines and identify opportunities to make it better so that you can deliver more high quality content without all the pain. If you would like to chat about your pipeline, schedule some time with me below.

My first job out of college, I worked at Avalanche Software, an up and coming game studio in Salt Lake City, Utah (now the behemoth developer of Hogwart’s Legacy and more!)

I had learned on Maya 1.0 (actually the beta) at BYU where I studied animation, and most of it was NURBS modelling (so incredibly painful for characters), only getting into polygon modelling towards the end (our professors were industrial/auto design guys trying to get an animation program up, and it’s now arguably the best in the nation!)

However, at Avalanche, I was introduced to Animation:Master - a quirky but insanely powerful do-it-all package. It was a brain shift to get used to it, but once I did, I started to understand the power of workflows, and how that impacts an entire product. Tools that work together seamlessly, flexible processes that allow quick and non-destructive iteration, and automated workflows that made hard things easy.

While we eventually moved to Maya (to be compatible with Disney, who ended up acquiring Avalanche), that workflow influences me and my views about pipeline to this day.

“Build your pipeline around your software.”

For as long as I can remember in the 3D space, it was always about the software. It was about the features, the promises of dramatically enhanced output, and relying on specific platforms to give you the exact functions and capabilities you needed. Software vendors developing an entire suite of tools that would solve your problems, but at the same time keep you dependent on their ecosystem forever.

You had to just accept it if you wanted their “killer feature”. They knew that, and they would give their software some secret sauce, or some proprietary data format so that you were stuck. It was a business, however.

Those days are done.

We used to build pipelines around specific software features or file formats. And for good reason - we wanted the most efficient way to get from build to deliver. But as 3D tools have matured, almost every platform became a clone of the other. Other than very specialized tools, most “killer features” from one platform are now pretty standard everywhere, and with open formats like USD, OpenPBR, and GLTF taking over, where data moves seamlessly across applications without data loss. I can do pretty much everything I need to in Blender that I could in Maya. Sometimes better, sometimes worse, but still I can. It’s no longer about what package, but how quickly you can move through it and author your content in it.

Since almost every platform offers nearly the exact same feature set, the question is no longer "Which software should we use?", but now "What is the ideal workflow for our company?"

Asking this question about your particular workflow is the ultimate make-or-break factor for the quality of your delivered product. Instead of obsessing over software capabilities, we need to ask ourselves critical workflow questions:

If your workflow is complicated or contains friction, your output will suffer. So get your whiteboard markers out, get the team in a room, and figure out your ideal workflow scenario so you can deliver the highest quality and quantity possible.

Once you have those questions answered, it’s time to start thinking systems.

Make your pipeline WORKFLOW-BASED, not SOFTWARE-BASED.

If you would like to dive deeper into your pipeline with me, and would like to explore how you can make it more powerful, efficient, faster, and more flexible, set up a quick 15 min discovery call with me. I’d love to know how we can make your pipeline better together.

About this newsletter: Every week, I share some insights into 3D content creation pipelines - tools, processes, success stories, pipeline mistakes, and more. It’s meant to help those involved in 3D product creation, from artists to managers and leadership, understand what is happening in their world, and how to use the latest technologies to create higher quality with greater efficiency, saving time and money.

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