LOS ANGELES — Last night, at SIGGRAPH 2017, Shotgun Software announced the winners of its fourth annual Pipeline Awards, recognizing outstanding achievement in pipeline tool development. This year’s Pipeline Award winners showed innovation in overcoming common challenges faced by VFX and animation studios, efficiency in scaling to meet the demands of large-scale projects, and generosity in making their tools open source to be leveraged by the wider community.
This year’s winners are:
- DreamWorks Animation for the DWATV Credits Tool: Originally designed to streamline credits by tracking and spell checking the names and titles of thousands of people who work across DreamWorks Animation, this tool grew to also track approvals and revision history, and connects to Shotgun. It’s now one of the studio’s most widely-used tools, bridging communication across the studio with simplicity in mind.
- Visual Concepts for the NBA 2K17 Facial Animation Pipeline: Visual Concepts’ facial animation pipeline saves time by automating previously manual tasks including tracking video, solving data, converting data to the proper format for the game, generating review material, and notifying supervisors for review and approval. The new automated pipeline handles thousands of tasks each day, saving time for artists and allowing them to complete the vast majority of facial animation in-house, giving them greater control over the final product.
- Psyop for Cryptomatte: Cryptomatte automatically creates ID mattes using information already available at render time including names, object namespaces, and material names. It also supports motion blur, transparency, and depth of field. Recently Psyop’s “Cryptomatte Committee” expanded the tool to the wider community by making an open standard Cryptomatte that integrates with Nuke, and AIShaders for Arnold.
“Honoring these great innovations in pipeline tool development is one of our favorite things to do each year – it’s amazing to see what technologists and tool builders are coming up with to make pipelines more manageable for studios of all sizes,” says Don Parker, co-founder of Shotgun and VP, production platform at Autodesk. “We’re always looking for new ways to make pipelines more efficient, and these creative solutions inspire us every day.”
Shotgun Software (
https://shotgunsoftware.com) is an Autodesk company that builds scalable, cloud-based software for review and production tracking. More than 1,000 creative companies rely on the Shotgun platform, which now includes the RV image/movie player, to provide essential business tools for managers and visual collaboration tools for artists and supervisors, often working globally with distributed teams. Studios of all sizes including DreamWorks, Framestore, Blizzard, Microsoft, Double Negative and Ubisoft have adopted Shotgun’s customizable system and contribute to the ongoing development of its growing ecosystem of applications.