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Sony Imageworks had a reusable digital library for the buildings in Manhattan. The fire from GhostRider also saw reuse. These models are tied to the production

Sony Imageworks had a reusable digital library for the buildings in Manhattan. The fire from GhostRider also saw reuse. These models are tied to the production pipeline at Sony: the shaders, data formats, texture pipeline, effects pipeline etc. A reusable backlot company does not exist because a standard studio production pipeline does not exist.

WorldMaker 10y ago
This is an interesting point. As an outsider to all of it, I'm curious if the open source work Pixar started and Disney has continued in standardizing various asset pipelines is helping, or at least might eventually help the landscape here. Again as a relatively pure outsider, it is interesting to watch the internal competition between Disney Feature Animation's renderer [Hyperion] and Pixar's RenderMan, and similarly have been curious about how much of that externally visible open source standardizing work on at least the pipelines leading to the renderers contributes and/or constrains the friendly seeming internal rivalry. Similarly with Disney now owning ILM, if ILM has or has not been building on top of some of the same production pipeline standards... Historically, a lot of the benefit to the Hollywood studio system was that a lot of the parts were standardized and interchangeable between studios. While a lot of studios did experiment with innovations in camera technology, very few studios had to reinvent the camera from scratch. Given how many special effects houses work on a blockbuster level film these days, I would imagine that the efficiencies in shared asset pipelines between corporate boundaries would eventually win out. It seems silly (at least as an industry outsider) that every company working on, for one example, an Iron Man film would have a different set of models/textures/shaders for Iron Man. (I get that on the one hand it's a bit like stunt work in that you don't need your A-list actor in every stunt or B-roll shot, but on the other hand, digital "actors" don't get fatigued or injured and can be in multiple places at once, they don't need body doubles/stunt actors...)
- viewtransform 10y ago
  There has been standardization in many areas since the days of Toy Story: Autodesk Maya, Houdini, Nuke are now standards in the industry. It took a while for forward thinking technical managers to convince studio executives that open-sourcing some internal tools and data formats would benefit the studio by making it a standard within the industry. OpenEXR (image format, ILM), Alembic(data format, Imageworks), OpenSubdiv(subdivison surfaces, Pixar), Ptex(texture mapping, Disney) are examples that were quickly adopted across studios. It helps that artists and engineers tend to move across studios bringing with them ideas about what worked best at the previous studio. In general, the software teams at the studios fall under the line item of "Overhead" in a producers financial spreadsheet. There is pressure to reduce this overhead by adopting standardized tools and not reinventing things in-house.

WorldMaker 10y ago

This is an interesting point. As an outsider to all of it, I'm curious if the open source work Pixar started and Disney has continued in standardizing various asset pipelines is helping, or at least might eventually help the landscape here. Again as a relatively pure outsider, it is interesting to watch the internal competition between Disney Feature Animation's renderer [Hyperion] and Pixar's RenderMan, and similarly have been curious about how much of that externally visible open source standardizing work on at least the pipelines leading to the renderers contributes and/or constrains the friendly seeming internal rivalry. Similarly with Disney now owning ILM, if ILM has or has not been building on top of some of the same production pipeline standards... Historically, a lot of the benefit to the Hollywood studio system was that a lot of the parts were standardized and interchangeable between studios. While a lot of studios did experiment with innovations in camera technology, very few studios had to reinvent the camera from scratch. Given how many special effects houses work on a blockbuster level film these days, I would imagine that the efficiencies in shared asset pipelines between corporate boundaries would eventually win out. It seems silly (at least as an industry outsider) that every company working on, for one example, an Iron Man film would have a different set of models/textures/shaders for Iron Man. (I get that on the one hand it's a bit like stunt work in that you don't need your A-list actor in every stunt or B-roll shot, but on the other hand, digital "actors" don't get fatigued or injured and can be in multiple places at once, they don't need body doubles/stunt actors...)

viewtransform 10y ago
There has been standardization in many areas since the days of Toy Story: Autodesk Maya, Houdini, Nuke are now standards in the industry. It took a while for forward thinking technical managers to convince studio executives that open-sourcing some internal tools and data formats would benefit the studio by making it a standard within the industry. OpenEXR (image format, ILM), Alembic(data format, Imageworks), OpenSubdiv(subdivison surfaces, Pixar), Ptex(texture mapping, Disney) are examples that were quickly adopted across studios. It helps that artists and engineers tend to move across studios bringing with them ideas about what worked best at the previous studio. In general, the software teams at the studios fall under the line item of "Overhead" in a producers financial spreadsheet. There is pressure to reduce this overhead by adopting standardized tools and not reinventing things in-house.