Creative Collaboration: Effective CG Pipelines - Any Size, Any Place

Saturday, 19 December | 5:30 AM - 9:15 AM | Room 502

With the explosive growth in the number of digital artists, there is an increasing opportunity to capture the creative potential that is currently devoted to creating user-generated content. This course provides a foundation for planning CG projects that typically start as small collaborations and later become to large productions. It examines the criteria for constructing and quickly deploying a simple pipeline for the initial collaboration and then proceeds step by step to scale up the pipeline to support hundreds of people.

At each step, the course examines the issues that limit efficiency and productivity. it addresses the decision points and potential problems in structure, organization, and pipeline as a production grows. It also explores the constituency of a distributed team and how it can be better organized and managed.

This course takes a systems approach to deconstructing projects at different scales and understanding the infrastructure requirements. The goal is to give course attendees the ability to create effective, self-organized projects that will easily scale with minimal cost and maximum efficiency.

Level

Beginner

Presentation Language

Presented in English

Prerequisites

None.

Instructor(s)

Richard Chuang
David (grue) DeBry
Michael A. Chang
Cloudpic Global

Instructor Bio(s)

Richard Chuang
Richard Chuang, CEO of Cloudpic Global, co-founded PDI/DreamWorks in the early 1980s. He has been involved in , CG projects in his career and over a dozen CG feature film and TV series as an executive at DreamWorks Animation. He helped build a studio from three people to over a thousand artists. He served as visual effects supervisor for 16 live-action films, and his accomplishments include authoring PDI's first renderer, lighting tool, compostor, and long-format pipeline. He received a Technical Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1998.
David (grue) DeBry 
David (grue) DeBry led design and development of production pipelines at major studios such as PDI and ESC, and has worked as both a digital artist and a CG supervisor at film and game studios such as Electronic Arts, Tippett Studios, and ILM. He is a published researcher who has worked in many areas of computer graphics for 20 years. A longtime SIGGRAPH volunteer and contributor, he was the SIGGRAPH 2006 Panels Chair.

Michael A. Chang
Michael A. Chang was formerly the head of global pipeline at DreamWorks Animation, where he oversaw the workflow and production process. He began his entertainment-industry career at PDI in 1996, where he assisted in scaling out the systems infrastructure to support feature-length animated films. Later, he served as studio technical supervisor working on commercials, visual effects, and web-based animated films.