Prism Pipeline release

Hey everyone,
I just released my Pipeline called Prism, which I developed over the last few years.
Prism is an artist-friendly Pipeline, mainly for animation and VFX projects, but it can help anyone who works within the CG industry. Prism does not only manage your scenefiles, exports and imports, but it also takes care of your playblasts, renderings and more.
Prism works with many industry standard tools out of the box. This includes Blender, Houdini, Maya, 3ds Max and Nuke.
And finally, Prism is free to use!

Here is a short introduction video of Prism:

You can download it for free on the website: https://prism-pipeline.com

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hey, great job !
not on a windows right now, but i’ll try it this weekend !
Seems to be really well crafted, and to communicates well with supported third parties !
For a personnal project of mine i was thinking about coding a python blender addon, but i’ll definitly use yours :smiley:

If there’s anything doable to contribute (of course a donation, i’ll make it this weekend :wink: ) like some python, UI or anything, don’t hesitate, i would love to help on this kind of project which really fills a lake in the open source landscap imo !

I saw you’re also develloping a renderfarm in parallel, do you have an idea about the release date ?
And do you plan to integrate afanasy (which i currently use) in your pipeline ?
And what about natron ?

Thanks a lot man !

Thank you tonton,
the best way to support the development is to do a donation. In the next few days I’ll prioritize all the requests and develop a roadmap. You are the first person who requests support for Afansy. I saw this tool a few months ago, but to be honest, the look of the user interface stopped me from testing it.
At the moment I haven’t thought about Natron, but I like the idea of supporting other open source tools.
When you make a donation, you can write me, which feature you would like to support with that donation and then I’ll prioritize that feature on my roadmap.

Thanks a lot !

This is great! I use Blender and 3dsMax in my workflow. I wish I could drop the 3dsMax part, but I need it for converting solid model cad files and for the occasional particle system. If you could support Fusion and maybe export shot sequences to daVinci, you would be my hero.

Hi
After install it I got this error and blender wont start.

cmd log:

Any help is very welcome
Thx

Any thoughts it add support for storyboarder?

I was looking forward to using this on a project I just started, but after install, nothing happens. I can’t find the program on my harddrive and clicking “Run Prism” does nothing. I never see anything other than the installer. No installation dialog. No tray icon.

New version 1.0.2

added: (3dsMax) Option in the Export state to show additional settings during the publish
added: Option to check for Prism updates in the “Help” menu of the “ProjectBrowser” and the “StateManager”
changed: The Empty 3dsMax scenes are not created by a student version of 3dsMax anymore
changed: Deadline jobsubmission “MachineLimit” parameter changed from 3 to 0 (unlimited)
fixed: (Maya) The creation of the Prism shelf could mess up other shelves (e.g. missing icons)
fixed: (Maya 2016) The RenderSettings dialog was opened every time the user clicked on the StateManager, when an ImageRender state existed
fixed: (3dsMax, Maya, Blender) Error when removing multiple objects from the Export state list at once
fixed: (3dsMax) Error when double clicking a renderpass in the ImageRender settings
fixed: (3dsMax) the force version option in the project settings didn’t recognize the configured version correctly in some cases
fixed: (Blender) Error when creating an empty blender scene from the ProjectBrowser and opening the StateManager
fixed: (Blender) Prism was not loaded correctly and prevented Blender from starting in some cases
fixed: Improved behaviour when sending bugs/feedback from within Prism (often the message could not be sent)
fixed: Error when rightclicking in an empty versions list of the “Select Task” dialog
fixed: Error when rightclicking on the preview in the ProjectBrowser in some cases

Hi sorry for not replying earlier, donation done :slight_smile:
Yeah a natron implementation would be great, and i think it’s not that far from nuke which you have already working !
about afanasy, i know the interface can seems a little “old”, but the tool itself works great, and is very easy to deploy ! it could be a plus to have a way to integrate it, i know a few company which uses it in production !
And i agree with @Talmore, it would be great to integrate in some way storyboard, and even some editing to keep track of shots and animatics, through blender vse, or other editing tools !
Anyway thanks again for this tool, it’s great !

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v1.0.7

added: Warning when the scenefile, render, export or playblast outputname is longer than 255 characters, which is not supported by Windows
added: Warning when an export has a different FPS value than the current scenefile
added: Option to force a specific FPS value in the project settings (a warning will pop up, when a scenefile with a different FPS value is opened)
added: Option in the Prism settings to publish Shotgun versions from a Shotgun user account (in the user tab, when Shotgun is enabled in the project settings)
added (Nuke): support for Deadline submissions in Nuke (You can use the regular Thinkbox submitter, but make sure you clicked the “Create directory” button on the WritePrism node)
improved: greatly reduced risk of corrupt configuration files
improved: better date format of the dailies folder, when sending media from the ProjectBrowser to the dailies folder
improved (Nuke): Layout of renderpasses in Nuke now imports all renderpasses ( not only specific VRay and Redshift passes like in previous versions)
changed: When opening the “Change Taskname” dialog on any state, the current taskname is now selected to make it faster to change the taskname
fixed: Error when the camera, which is selected in a playblast state got deleted before the publish in some cases
fixed: Error when opening the TaskSelection window in some cases
fixed: Rightclicking on the browse buttons in the “DCC apps” tab of the Prism settings didn’t open the folder
fixed: Error when opening the ProjectBrowser, when a config of a recent project is corrupt/invalid in some cases
fixed: Installer didn’t find the correct maya versions, when the windows documents folder was changed (e.g. to onedrive)
fixed: (Maya) Alembic files couldn’t be exported, when a space was in the outputpath
fixed: (Maya): Error when the selection set required by the ExportState is renamed or deleted before the publish
fixed (Houdini): Error when changing the outputtype of an ExportState
fixed (Houdini): Rightclicking on the browse button of an ImportState didn’t open the windows explorer in some cases
removed: “External Pandora submission” icon on the Prism shelf (because Pandora has its own shelf now)

We’re using Afanasy / CGRU in a professional studio pipeline since 3 years now and despite the “strange” UI look the tool itself never failed us. The render manager has been running non-stop for over a year now without crashing and without a single failed frame.
Super easy to deploy, it has all the features we need without the useless stuff that just makes for a nice eye candy like dozens of graphs that show you what voltage which CPU core was running at a certain point but takes 10 mouse clicks to find out which machine crashed and where’s the crash log.

IMHO this would be a worthy open-source companion for an open-source pipeline tool like Prism. :slight_smile:

Oh, and just in case the current GUI is the reason for not giving Afanasy a second look, take a look here:

It’s a super awesome node based Qt QML GUI for Afanasy with OpenGL that’s currently in development.

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That UI looks really nice. Currently I’m not using it personally (maybe I will in the future), which is why it still hasn’t a high priority for me.

However, in the latest Prism version (1.1.0) it is possible to add support for additional Renderfarm managers with a Prism Plugin. So if someone is interested in Afanasy support and has some basic Python skills, he could develop a Afanasy plugin for Prism, which I could add to the official Prism version to make it available for everyone.

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Version 1.1.1 makes Prism more customizable, has many minor workflow improvements and of course bugfixes.

Here is the changelog:

v1.1.1:

added: Support for custom plugins, which allow to modify various behaviours of Prism

added: Option to place Prism in any location and to use a central installation

added: Button in the Prism Settings to update Prism from a .zip file (downloaded from GitHub) or directly from GitHub (requires git installed)

added: Double clicking on a task in the “Select Task” dialog imports the latest version

added: Option to set the project fps in the current scene if there is a fps mismatch during the opening of a scenefile

added: (Houdini) Support for USD export/import

added: (3dsMax) Import options will be displayed when pressing “CTRL” during the import

changed: The “Send to dailies” option creates now links instead of .bat files on Windows

changed: Performance improvements

fixed: various bugs

2 Likes

Thank you for this amazing pipeline management system! Looks really awesome, exactlt what I was looking for.
I’m running into a couple small issues though (I’m using a macbook for project management so all the issues will be mac related)

  • I’m not able to run either prism settings, tray or the prism browser unless running it via the maya plugin. Security preferences are set up correctly, not sure what the issue is.

  • I don’t see blender in the software list when installing despite having installed 2.79b. I also have 2.8, which I’d prefer. Is there an option to add DCC Apps manually in the settings?

  • When making a new asset version in maya change preview doesn’t seem to work on mac, it’s not making a screenshot (tried on windows and there it seems to work just fine)

Any pointers on how to fix these issues?

Also, are you planning any support for zbrush?

I had this under my radar for a while, but still didn’t look into it properly. It looks super promising thou!
Does prism provide a version control system for assets or something like that?

Thank you!

Prism-Pipeline is a full featured asset management system that does a lot more beside version control. Here are some of the currently available features:

  • Project organization into assets (including multi level asset folders/categories) and sequences/shots, each of which can have tasks, work files and published elements (native project files, geometry caches, rendered images, etc.)
  • Tracking the versions and dependency states of the assets/shots tasks and the published elements used in them, along with notifications and easy updating of any changed assets/elements
  • Native support for a large number of DCC apps (Blender - both 2.79 and 2.8, Maya, 3DS Max, Houdini, Natron, Nuke, Fusion, Photoshop), geometry formats (app dependent - including Alembic, FBX, etc.), image/video formats (EXR, PNG, JPG, MP4, etc), flipbook viewers/media players (RV, DJV View, VLC, etc)
  • Easily extensible through Python plugins
  • Integration with production management apps (Shotgun natively, TACTIC and Trello through scripts/plugins)
  • Support for submitting to different render farm management systems (Pandora and Deadline natively, others can be added as Python plugins)
  • And so forth…

Long story short, Prism-Pipeline basically provides a complete asset pipeline that is very, very feature rich and well suited for small to medium complexity VFX/animation pipelines.

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thanks for the answer! That’s good to know! :slight_smile:

interesting support for Tactic

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How do you UNINSTALL Prism for Blender ???
there is no entry for it in Programs and Features in the Windows Control panel to let you UNINSTALL -
BAD !