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We used it at DreamWorks Animation, but also had our own various 2D bitmap editing tools. I can think of a few reasons it fell out of favor in the 3D animated
by diskzero 5y ago
We used it at DreamWorks Animation, but also had our own various 2D bitmap editing tools.
I can think of a few reasons it fell out of favor in the 3D animated film space. Any process that required artists to come in after a render was complete is bad news for your budget. The more you can accomplish inside of your surfacing and lighting tools, the better.
For surface creation, artists in general would prefer to use tools that they are familiar with, and if your pipeline can support export from Photoshop, then that is they are going to want to use.
While there are still a lot of proprietary tools in use for lighting and rigging, the days of completely proprietary tool chains and pipelines are over. Software suites of no longer running on SGI boxes with a lot of proprietary formats. A lot of work has been done on interchange formats so it is easier to get your data in and out Maya, Photoshop, etc.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> While there are still a lot of proprietary tools I think you mean something like “bespoke” or maybe just “cinema industry specific”; all your counterexamples to “proprietary tools” are, in fact, proprietary tools.
- spijdar 5y agoProprietary software but "open systems", in the way that OpenVMS is certainly not open source, same with OpenStep, and several other examples I'm forgetting. But they're documented and accept/output open formats, as opposed to being giant proprietary monoliths. (this is why some people are very insistent on always using the full "FOSS")
- diskzero 5y agoAh yes. Good point. We wrote a lot of custom software, internal to DreamWorks (or PDI in my case) with no intention of commercializing them. Some of the tools did end up getting used by other studios, but that wasn't an intended goal.