Project Background

In February 2022, Digital District informed me that they had been engaged on a live-action feature film, Chien et Chat, in which the two lead characters needed to be generated in CGI and integrated into live footage. This was the studio’s first project of this scale, requiring us to address several key challenges: organizing human resources (artists) and technical resources (render farm), managing the associated file infrastructure (a large volume of intermediate files, some of considerable size), and maintaining output image quality, both visually and technically, to preserve flexibility for later adjustments during color grading.

To meet this challenge and optimize our human and technical resources, I was asked to create a software to automate the image production pipeline based on input assets. At each stage, the tool would generate working files to support the artists (who used them as a starting point) and publish an initial version of each shot to our production tracking platform (FTrack). This allowed the team to estimate remaining work and move forward quickly and consistently.

Project Scope

The goal was to retrieve all assets for each shot as soon as they became available, and integrate them into the various templates (scene file templates used by our 3D/compositing software) in order to automatically generate intermediate cache files at the output of each task, to be imported into the next one. Ultimately, this would produce the final images, publish them, and allow the team to review them and precisely define any required revisions. The film’s pipeline also had to account for the fact that, while nearly all assets were created in-house, animation was handled by a third-party studio (La Station Animation), which delivered files to us to be incorporated into our workflow.

FTP Integration

Our approach was to set up an FTP server connected to both networks. On our end, we developed an automated scanning system that ran every hour, notifying us of newly available files so they could be imported into our company’s pipeline.

The Automatou Software

Once elements were imported into our pipeline, the Automatou software allowed us to select, for each shot, the elements that would make up the v0 scene. However, before generating scenes and computation jobs, we ran a sanity check to verify that the animation studio’s deliverables complied with our delivery specifications (asset naming conventions, number of points consistancy on main characters, collisions between animations and set geometry, etc…).

Scenes generation involved creating a CFX template scene, generating fur and grease simulation jobs, creating the render scene along with its render jobs, and finally creating the Nuke compositing scene, generating the compositing jobs and publishing the results to FTrack.