Hi guys!
So I think this “questing” will be very talk-y, but I’m more looking for general input, experience and ideas.
So I’m working on a quite small studio (around 40). This is the first time in a long time we’re working on our own in house project. This means that there is no established pipeline when it come to the art department. Maya 2014 is the standard tool, though a few are working in 3D Max and Blender because of previous project with other studios.
I’m first and foremost looking to set up the pipeline for the project I’m on. But I want to establish some rules so the tool library can easily be adopted by the rest of the studio when needed. At the moment I’ve written some animations, rigging and exporting scripts, most of them in PyMel. The user base is minimal at the moment (me and an artist) so I feel that this is the change to make something more stable before a lot more people start using the scripts. I already feel the current setup scale really bad the more characters we get!
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Which module should I use? I really like PyMel, but it might be more flexible just using maya.cmds? Or should I learn API 2.0? I don’t think there is a lot of Python knowledge except me. The last scripts I saw from the studio was a couple of years old and written in MEL.
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Is it really worth trying to setup our own pipeline, or should we maybe use a already existing pipeline setup like Red9’s tool and build on top of that?
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What’s the standard for sharing different tools to different projects? Do you have some tools that are general and some of that are project specific?
All inputs and feedback are welcome!