Over the past three years, Blue Sky Studios built a USD-centric layer on top of its next generation pipeline framework, Conduit. This transition involved mapping the legacy Blue Sky workflows into USD constructs. In addition, direct artist feedback during the delivery of six short films provided insights that informed the evolution of the Conduit backend to support these modernized workflows.
We present a procedural block-based approach for USD pipelines that minimizes up-front USD knowledge requirements while ensuring users can still leverage the power of native USD. Building on USD and Conduit, we define fundamental workflow principles and philosophies on artist-interaction that guide our modular Houdini-based toolsets. Finally, we discuss the successes and challenges in scaling these workflows into production.
Product designers from Disney, Pixar, Blue Sky, and DreamWorks Animation discuss the challenges of designing proprietary software for feature animation production, why UX design is necessary for studios that build their own tools, and how it has impacted their studios.
Reinventing the humanoid character build pipeline at Blue Sky Studios presented several opportunities to create synergy between different processes, all centering around the concept of creating and maintaining a standardized Universal Mesh. The automation of rig argument placement, the building of rigging tools that use aspects of character geometry as inputs, the separation of character data from assets, and the creation of a stylized simulation-based approach to deform animated characters were all influenced by this base Universal Mesh. Ultimately, this approach offered new ways to get the most out of our character pipeline.
We present a novel and artist-controllable system for stylizing metallic surfaces. This technique filters a beauty render with a Cryptomatte-encoded identifiers pass to generate a new stylized image. The ids pass drives an image-space color flood fill algorithm that uniformly colors regions to create a faceted metal appearance. The ids are generated using a variety of methods that target different aspects of the reflective surfaces. Tools that further modulate the facet ids give artists control over the effect in both render and compositing. The result is a smooth and temporally coherent effect that complements other non-photorealistic imagery. We can expand and generalize this technique to apply to non-faceted metallic surfaces.
