Blender Pipeline ( Asset Manager and much much more )

Coding Released Scripts and Themes
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So ( since 2020 ) I’m working on this small film Moria’s Race. And I’m crazy. I can’t live without complicating everything to such a degree that it becomes impossible. Anyway I’ve written this program called “Organizer”, then renamed it to be “Blender-Organizer”, then thought - “Why am I doing this in python 2 ?” - and re-wrote this program in python 3 under the name “VCStudio”. And then ( 3 years later ) realized what a stupid name that was. And finally renamed it into Blender Pipeline. Hope this time people would at least understand what it’s for.

What it’s for?

Blender has an asset manager and it’s cool, but it’s not enough. A movie production doesn’t start with assets. It starts with a story. Story has scenes. Multiple drafts of those scenes. Sometimes scenes go one after the other. And sometimes you are Christopher Nolan and what you are trying to write is just one huge Temporal Pincer Movement inside a Temporal Pincer Movement inside a Temporal Pincer Movement. So a program has to accommodate your needs. Therefor, alongside an asset manager, Blender Pipeline has a Node-Based Story Editor.

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As you can see I couldn’t help myself, so I included a full on desktop-like link system to be able to travel inside a project, where ever you’d like, as fast as possible.

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As you can see I’m now working on Scene 8, Shot 22. I access the shot from the text of the story directly. You can see there is a blend-file in that shot. And I have a checklist of things to do ( which I can edit ) on the right side. If you look closer into the blend-file itself, there is a link button ( to link assets ) and a render button ( to put the file into a rendering queue ). There is a button in a different place to start this queue. So I can put multiple shots to render overnight.

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To combat my laziness and procrastination ( which doesn’t really work, since I’m typing this text right here right now ) I’ve developed a whole analytical system and a scheduling system. This is, by the way, a very new screenshot. I just polished the analytics a bit. Now they are useful. And they are screaming at me that I have missed 3 tasks already. I need to run!

Downloads

Git Repository of Blender Pipeline

Disclaimer!

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

In all seriousness, though. There is a feature that is beyond broken. It may work. Please don’t turn it on while working on anything serious. It’s called “Multi-user”. Imagine multi-player, but for a program. It’s not tested almost what so ever. In theory it could work. But also in theory it could suddenly overwrite files without asking questions. So don’t turn it on. By default it’s turned off.

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Ooh, this sounds very useful! I’ll be excited to see this in action :slight_smile:

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Just did a small edit Which gives the user this little button.

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It opens up a small terminal program that will run on the background, that will backup all of your files every 30 seconds. It also checks if the file is 0 bytes. And skips backing it up if so. I just had to do that button since I forgot to start this backup thing manually and lost 2 hours worth of progress. If I will still forget to press it, I think I will make it pop up automatically by default.

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This is a cool app, I’ll definitely give this a shot. Really reminds me of some of the software I’ve used in production before. Although not as colourful lol

To reveal you a horrible truth - I sleep in the same room as this computer.

I sleep directly across from my computer :confused:

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I am using a Moria’s Race Movie Project custom theme. If you will just install it, it will by default be a bit more gray.

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In the settings folders there are themes. You can add a theme into there manually if you want something extremely custom.

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Ah yes! I saw the grey version on the GitHub page after I made the comment. App looks good either way though.

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This looks very interesting! Specially the anti-procrastination feature, lol. I’ll see if I can give it a spin on my machine, wince it sounds like a program that will come in handy for my current short film.

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I have a question, if you don’t mind… Have you tried Kiitsu?

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No. Never heard about it. What is it?

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It’s a project manager, but with much more overhead than your project. It’s what the Blender Foundation uses for managing the tasks of their Open Movies.

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Unfortunately, it’s near impossible to use outside of the Blender Studio, due to their internal file structure being hard-coded throughout

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I believe it’s actually software agnostic. Unless Blender Studio uses a specialized fork, I don’t think they have anything Blender-specific. Maybe you are confusing it with Flamenco? I believe that one was very Blender Studio-tailored.

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Have you tried Kitsu? It’s software agnostic, yes, but not filepath agnostic:

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To be clear, that’s specifically about the addon that the Blender Studio uses and publishes for free, rather then the actual base Kitsu software itself.

One could still use Kitsu as is for asset/project tracking etc, but you’d have to do it all manually, which from a file management point of view and being able to directly check .blend files into and out of Kitsu then likely makes the whole system somewhat less useful.

Unless of course you exactly replicate the file structure/naming etc of the Blender Studio or have the skills/knowledge to customise the addon.

At least that was my experience, but of course I could be wrong.

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I see. I have seen it under a different name I think it was “Attract” or something. And I don’t like it’s layout. Also Blender-Pipeline is more focused on local project ( with a somewhat working, almost broken, syncing feature for local network ). So you need no accounts to use it.

I’ve tried using Blender-Pipeline over git. It works just fine. Though you will need to use git push and git pull manually at the moment. But I can perhaps make an interface for it, if it will find a git folder in the project.

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Attract was the project management system that the Blender Studio created and used on previous films. It was very much basically just made for them and they then just released the code.

Kitsu is the software they are using now. While it’s designed to do much the same thing, Project/Production Management, it has nothing to do with Attract. Kitsu is made by a completely separate company that offer it as a online software as a service, but they also publicly publish the whole source code, so one can install and use it locally, if you wanted too.

I’ve been meaning too have a look at your little Pipeline app, but just not had a chance to get around to it at this stage, but I really should.

That’s the render farm manager, which while previous versions where somewhat Blender Studio focused, the latest version is much more generic and from what I’ve seen could be setup on a local network fairly easily.

Mind you, having said that, I’ve yet to do so, since I only have one PC for Blender/rendering, at this stage.

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I believe Attract was replaced by Kitsu, but it’s a different software.

My question came about because I was curious if there was some feature that you copied over or that you’d want to copy. But if you hadn’t use it, then the question was of no use. :sweat_smile:

Blender-Pipeline is more focused on local project

I love that you focus on that! I’m honestly considering using it to my next project, but I’ll need to investigate it further.

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