Shitgrid

This pipeline was an experiment to see how much of a pipeline I could get done in 2 weeks.

I wanted this pipeline to be fully original, so I tried to avoid ideas from existing pipelines.

Eventually I realised I was reinventing the wheel after looking at Kitsu's codebase, which uses the same idea of transferring data between objects.

Features

Publishing

When publishing an asset, it works like a namespace. All data blocks relevant to the chosen publish layer get tagged with custom data.

Custom data is used to create an imaginary link, associating data blocks to an asset name, ID, layer and version.

Conceptually this means any data can be published, even if it can't be represented as an object (such as text, brushes, palettes, etc)

Any data blocks which are already tagged won't get retagged. This is because a single Blender can contain multiple assets (for example when scene building), and publishing should only affect the relevant asset name.

If a data block is already tagged and belongs to the publish name and layer, its version in the custom data will be incremented.

Updating

When updating, it searches through all data blocks and checks the version in their custom data. Any outdated data blocks will be rebuilt according to their layer.

Fetching

Fetching is meant to append a prebuilt asset created by build.bat.

For the public release it checks whether build exist, and otherwise manually builds all layers for an asset.

Building

Building is a developer feature intended to manually build specific layers with specific versions. It turned out to be the most useful feature in practice.

Components

Website

The website is designed to imitate Shotgrid, with basic abilities to create and view tasks and assets.

When an asset is added via the frontend, the backend creates a folder on disk within the wip folder.

The folders are used by the Blender addon as described below.

Blender Addon

The Blender addon is responsible for publishing, version control and building.

Once a wip asset folder is added via the website, the addon can publish Blender files into that folder.

The build scripts take wip files and consolidate them into single assets, located in the build folder.

Architecture

Website Backend

The backend is written in JavaScript using Express.

It doesn't use a database for now, just basic file storage in assets.json and tasks.json.

Website Frontend

The frontend is written in JavaScript and JSX using React.

Blender Addon

The Blender addon is written in Python.

Environment Variables

Website

• Set SG_WEB_DB to the folder you want the JSON files to be stored, for example C:/web_db
• Set REACT_APP_SG_SERVER to whatever URL the backend is hosted on, for example http://localhost
• Set REACT_APP_SG_PORT to whatever port the backend is hosted on, for example 5000

Blender Addon

• The Blender database must be set in the addon preferences.
• Set it to the folder you want Blender files to be saved, for example C:/blender_db

Installation

Website Frontend

1. Install NPM and Node.js
2. Go to website/client
3. Run npm install
4. Run npm start

Website Backend

1. Install NPM and Node.js
2. Go to website/server
3. Run npm install
4. Run npm start

Blender Addon

1. Zip the contents of the blender folder
2. Open Blender preferences
3. Install the zipped folder as an addon
4. Press N to open the menu