Workflow

Workflow

Ted Boardman tedb@tbmax.com         http://www.tbmax.com


I’d like to thank Jimmy Hassell, Leonard Teo, and Margit Geil for putting on a great 3D Festival conference in Copenhagen in May and, especially, to say thanks to all those who were in my presentation. The conference was an interesting mix of film and television, gaming, and architectural sessions and participants.

It’s always interesting to hear from a mixed crowd that each work discipline shares many common issues with the others when it comes down to process and workflow.

Copenhagen is a great city to visit, a lateral city rather than a vertical one, with many different types of neighborhoods and waterfront areas, but minimal high-rise buildings. This was the first time I’d been back for a real visit in about 15 years and while things have changed somewhat, I could easily find my way around to old haunts and places of interest.

Because of the new bridge across the straits to Sweden I was also able to take a train and high speed ferry to visit friends on Bornholm, a Danish island between Sweden and Poland known for it’s smoked and pickled fish… and cod liver oil.

All of my travels went smoothly because I had planned ahead, which brings me to this month’s topic. This is a synopsis of my presentation in Copenhagen on general workflow in a visualization or animation office. During my presentation I could see plenty of heads nodding in agreement as I mentioned various issues that I have seen in my travels while training 3ds max and Autodesk VIZ. Not software specific issues, but fundamental workflow processes that affect us all.

It would probably be impossible to implement all of the following in an office and many of you will have already addressed the problems to help smooth the workflow in your offices. Some of the topics will be things that you plan to “get to” when you have some spare time, but that spare time never seems to come.

Read through these items in this month’s column and try to envision how the suggestions I put forward might be implemented in your particular workflow. Each is important in it’s own right and the more you can make part of your daily process the smoother things will generally go. In this era of global economic slowness, it is critical that you are working as efficiently as possible and many of these suggestions are essentially cost free, except for a bit of ramp up time.

Preparation and Planning

The chain of command: Critical communication paths between those who order the work, those who create the content, and those who present to the client must be established with each having an understanding of the available talent and resources.

Communications between the client and production staff, whether that is designers in-house or the actual client, will be something that will develop over time and constantly evolve as the whole visualization process matures. However, educating the client about the general process involved in creating the visualizations can smooth these communications. The client need not or should not know how scenes are created, but should know what types of requests will take time and which can be done quickly.

Letting the in-house client sit in on a half-day, hands-on training session with the 3D software can help them understand that there is no magic “make art” button on the computer and give them better insight to some of the difficulties the production staff faces.

Regular short meetings between the production staff and the in-house “clients” can keep each team up to date on processes that either increase or hinder productivity from either side.

Needs assessment and storyboarding: an important step in productivity is determining the scope and quality of work required to satisfy the client’s expectations within the confines of time and budget.

Not every job that goes out the door requires photo-realistic quality images to communicate the important messages to the client. Developing stages of production can avoid costly changes. For example, if details are too high early in the design development or if complete materials are applied to models it may focus unnecessary attention on decisions that are better left for later.

Hand sketch quick images of the views that will be necessary for still images or for key frames of an animated sequence. This will help identify problem areas before 3D production progress too far and it is a good method of involving traditional hand renderers into the new technology. They have a wealth of visualization experience that should be taken advantage of.

Again, in this time of economic woes, it is extremely important not to be doing any more work than absolutely necessary. When the cash is flowing freely again, then we can allow ourselves the luxury “just model everything and we’ll choose what we want” attitude.

Execution

Maximize your talent and resources: determine when it makes sense to reuse CAD data and operators and when it is better to recreate information specifically for visualization.

The fastest method of getting the initial job done is not the same as the most productive method. For example, if your team only has modeling experience in CAD, it may be the fastest because it’s what they know, but later modeling changes or material assignments may slow the process.

Make sure that you have an understanding of all the tools available to you before deciding on a production process and, with a little practice, it will become habit to choose the right tool for the right job.

Choose a team with both desire and talent: familiarize a broad range of personnel with the visualization process and cultivate a pool of artists with a strong desire to apply the extra effort required to become proficient.

Forcing staff to become directly involved in the visualization process leads to bad office politics and pulls good talent from areas they can be more productive.

Set up a productive working environment: provide and maintain current and powerful computer systems. Hardware is a fixed cost item and can be passed through the office, as CAD stations, then as clerical machines for years to come.

Do not, however, buy new hardware as the sole method of increasing productivity until you have mastered the art of scene optimization. Using new hardware as a fix for poor production practices is a waste of resources and time.

Seating, lighting, and input devices are worth special consideration in a visualization office. For example, providing a mouse and a tablet at each workstation can minimize stress and injury during long work sessions.

A clean, stable network system for network rendering can increase production with very little cost and maintenance.

Knowing when to stop: focus on the elements of visualization that will impact the output the most and leave the rest by the wayside. Do not use the technology for the sake of the technology alone.

Upon reaching a certain level of quality or communication value it is important to be able to stop and move on to the next task. Perfection is an unobtainable goal, always worth striving for up to the point where it becomes a burden on production.

Integration and Output

Develop office standards: object naming conventions, material and map libraries, and 3D object libraries are some of the standardized areas that can greatly enhance productivity.

Object naming cannot be stressed enough. It is more important than the CAD layering conventions your office has developed over the years because of the very large number of individual objects in a typical scene.

Material naming standards and material library organization can also help avoid duplication of effort. Develop central depositories for maps and basic materials that are organized by category so that all users have easy access to a fundamental starting point to create custom materials for projects.

Work in layers: layers in this sense are elements such as background walls, mid-ground furniture, or foreground details that are based on distance from the camera or viewer.

Layers allow you to add detail where it will communicate the necessary information to the client while leaving it out where it will speed rendering. Simulate geometry with maps for the background objects while modeling the foreground.

Investigate compositing: layers of 3D objects, as described above, can be managed as 2D elements that can be combined and edited with compositing software much faster and more efficiently by creating large 3D scenes.

This also includes the capabilities of manipulating special image elements to modify shadows, reflections, or object color without the need to rerender the entire 3D scene.

Cinematic animation techniques: learn techniques of movement used in traditional film and television work to develop animations of short duration that are edited into a cohesive presentation.

This will allow you to develop much small scenes with minimal camera movement that are easy to manage and exciting and informative to the client. Everyone wins.

Output capabilities: predetermine file types and image resolutions that will enable you to reuse the content in a wide array of output types from video tape and DVD, to streaming media and websites, to large printed still images. All scenes should be rendered to individual still images sequences and converted to compressed animation files as necessary.

Summary

There are undoubtedly more processes that can be streamlined in a typical office to speed the production in visualization, but if you can make use of several of these suggestions it will be a good beginning.

I would suggest starting with an office-wide naming scheme and materials organization, then into scene optimization, i.e. only model what you will see and make that as efficient as possible. All the while focus on integrating a new spirit of communication between those who order the work and those who do the work to minimize changes.

For those offices that rely primarily on CAD as the modeling tool, start learning what your visualization software, be it 3ds max or Autodesk VIZ, can do in terms of flexible and efficient modeling and work that into your production pipeline, slowly at first then onto larger and more complex objects and scenes.

Lastly, start to learn the possibilities of composition or the layering of scene elements, to speed the workflow. It is not uncommon in film and video work to combine 30 or more layers that come from a variety of production sources into a single output image or animation. This will work for architecture, as well.

Good luck and have fun.