Animation Pipeline

This is one that has been quite a blur for me till now.

However, I am reading from: http://www.donbluth.com/academy.html

And here's what it's all about.

There are 5 major steps the animated film must go through after the script is approved and before the original score and final sound effects are added. They are:

1. Storyboard
2. Ruff Animation
3. Clean Up
4. Special Effects Animation
5. Final Color

I like how this guy puts it:

In the past, people would have said "assembly-line". In computer graphics, one uses the term "rendering pipeline" and I think it's possible that the term "animation pipeline" developed from it. It may well now be used for traditional animation as well, but I suspect that it came from computer graphics and animation.

"Pipelining" is a programming term. "Pipes" are a typical feature of UNIX-like operating systems. A "pipe" is an entity that makes it possible for different processes to communicate. In fact, this topic is called "Inter-Process Communication" or "IPC". Pipes are one way of performing IPC; there are others. A typical style of programming in UNIX-like environments involves the use of "filters". A "filter" is a program that reads the output of one program and writes to the input of another using pipes.
If you type a command at the command line that looks like this:

> program_a | program_b | program_c

the "|" characters represent pipes. If you're programming, you can create pipes explicitly in your program.

The process of creating complex computer graphics can be implemented in this way. A single, monolithic program doesn't have to do all the jobs. For example, you could write a modelling program that passes its output to a program that does hidden surface removal. It, in turn, passes its output to a program that performs the first stage of rendering. Rendering is quite a complex task, so it's reasonable to divide it up into several stages.

Laurence Finston