Tools behind the shots

Heavy environments and crowds made layout, animation and lighting scenes slow to open and painful to swap.

A custom Maya plug-in node and command set that holds every representation of an asset (proxy, render, GPU cache, Alembic, USD, renderer standins) and switches between them per department, with an asset manager UI and attribute editor templates.

Assets, animation caches and shading moved between Maya, Houdini and the farm in different formats, and every handoff was rebuilt by hand.

The studio's import/export layer: chunked Alembic and USD export with custom mayaUSD chasers, scene rebuilds from USD data, and a DCC-neutral library that generates per-asset and per-shot USD stages with references, payloads, variants and shading overrides.

Animators and layout artists spent time setting up cameras, overlays and color for every review, and results varied by artist.

A playblast system with per-camera capture, HUD overlays, color-managed output and a queue of post actions: multiview comps through Nuke, encoding, publishing a Version to ShotGrid and opening it in RV for review.

Assets and caches were approved without being seen under real lighting, so problems surfaced late in shots.

An automated QC render pipeline that assembles a scene from published caches and USD standins, sets up render layers for Arnold, V-Ray or Maya Software, submits to Deadline and publishes the results back to ShotGrid.