Pipeline development in animation and video game industry is a classy and interesting term, but a little confusing. Like art doesn’t  have one universal definition, production pipelines cant be defined in one particular way. No one can say “Look! I made the best production pipeline”. It changes according to project, demand, budget available, technology and available talent pool. Here we are not going to discuss about a perfect pipeline model. You have to design a basic pipeline suiting your production environment.

You will discover its strengths and weaknesses, when your team starts using it on different projects. Your team members will start giving you feedback according to what they need to work efficiently. Modular approach always helps you in improvisation process which is very important because every project comes with its specific expectations to the pipeline

It is possible to make a pipeline without using programming and instead choosing off-the-shelf software or plugins. But a busy production house cant  solely depend on third party vendors . They often need customized in-house solutions for greater control and flexibility. Besides abstract, administrative and budgetary dissection, in-depth technical analysis of any pipeline model is extremely important. In such cases programming can  make the process flow in a much cleaner, practical and cost effective way.

Always use source control like source safe or TortoiseSVN and do proper documentation for pipeline programming itself. Instead of using different coding habits, try to follow standard coding rules, so that in future others can understand it easily. This leads to better maintenance and bug fixing process. Further handy practices are Class Diagram, profiling and unit testing. One point we have to keep in mind is that at any point of time any member of the pipeline development team can be absent or leave company. So it is better to be always prepared  for easy hand over of responsibility.

Last 5 posts by Deepak Shrivastava