Thoughts on an improved production pipeline:

The aim of an efficient pipeline is to get the entire production team working at their full capacity at all times, and to coordinate this with a predictable advance in production according to a pre-determined schedule.

A good pipeline is dependent on a strong division of skills within the animation team. Each department must be able to meet its deadlines, as the various departments will be completing tasks simultaneously. Missed deadlines will have a serious, negative effect on the ability of other departments to perform, and therefore also on the production schedule.

Screenplay, design and storyboarding should be completed and locked off before any 3D production begins. However, provided the design and storyboarding team can realistically stay ahead of the animation team, this could overlap. A complete voice track should be recorded prior to the commencement of 3D production.

The optimized pipeline will allow animation to begin as early in the production process as possible. Animation is the most time-consuming process in the optimized 3D production pipeline and the amount of animation to be done should determine the length of the production.

Performance animation should be used from the very start of production as a visualization tool. The first step should be the creation of animatics from storyboard drawings. The shot layout should be plotted and animation blocked out in crude strokes. This should be done for all the shots in the storyboard. These animatics should then be assembled and cut to the voice track (which would necessarily need to be recorded before 3D production commences). This will allow a first glimpse at the flow of the scene.

Once this animatic has been edited, revised and approved, it should be cut into scenes for principle animation.

A character’s proportions are the very least that need to be known about a character before performance animation can be recorded. Skeletons are the most problematic element to change once the production has progressed, and should be locked off during the design stage of the production. This will allow very basic, yet proportional rigged models to the be used by the performance animation dept. to capture motion data that will initially be used for shot layout, but could also be applied to the character rig, once developed.

Emphasis should be placed on developing procedural elements where possible. Areas where this is essential are character rigging and rendering, though most area benefit from reusable scripts. Naming conventions are extremely important and should be applied strictly.

The pipeline should be designed so that the character can develop in a manner that is non-destructive to its animation. This is possible if the modeling, texturing, rigging and skinning departments follow these guidelines.

1.) The character’s skeleton should remain unchanged. A change can only be made if a complementary tool, converting all previous animation to the new skeleton, is developed concurrently.
2.) The texturing and skinning of a character should only commence once the modeling has been locked off.
3.) Lip sync animation should only commence on completion and approval of the facial rig. While the non-destructive addition of custom facial blends is possible, it can create inconsistency throughout the length of the production. Lip sync is a relatively quick process, so delaying its application should not prove too problematic.

Scripts that automate the rendering process should be developed at the same stage as the characters and set are being developed. Rendering will happen in the latter stages once the characters and sets have been finalized. A bottleneck can occur at this point if a number of scenes need to be rendered simultaneously and all of the shots require manual tweaking.

And a final few cents:

The Feedback pilot has shown us that we can produce world-class computer animation in South Africa. We will need to adapt our style, sharpen our skills and refine our production pipelines, but a full-length feature is not beyond our reach. We have a shortage of experienced key frame animators, so we need to embrace the emerging performance animation technology and make it work for us.