What is publishing?

A process of exporting particular data from your work scene to be shared with others.

Think of publishing as a checkpoint between two people, making sure that we catch mistakes as soon as possible and don’t let them pass through pipeline step that would eventually need to be repeated if these mistakes are not caught.

Every time you want to share a piece of work with others (be it camera, model, textures, animation or whatever), you need to publish this data. The main reason is to save time down the line and make it very clear what can and cannot be used in production. This process should mostly be handled by publishing scripts but in certain cases might have to be done manually.

Published assets should comply to these rules:

• Clearly named, based on internal naming conventions.

• Versioned (with master version created for certain types of assets).

• Immediately usable, without any dependencies to unpublished assets or work files.

• Immutable

All of these go into the publish folder for the given entity (shot, asset, sequence)

How Publishing works?

• Create: Set up publish instances in your scene. Think of these as collections or groups that point to the work you want to publish.
  This is typically done by selecting the objects you want to publish, choosing the product type from the creator tool, and then clicking create.

• When the publish process is triggered (e.g., by clicking the publish button), AYON follows this procedure:

  • Collect: Gathers the necessary data for the publish instances.

  • Validate: Checks the collected data for accuracy.

  • Extract: Exports the data to the specified export (output) path in your publish instances. This is usually a relative location to the workfile (work directory).

  • Integrate: Transfers the exported files to the publish location and registers them in AYON's database.

Product Types

Published products are categorized into ‘product types’ based on what is their purpose in the production. Knowing a product type should always tell you what to expect from the given publish. For example if something is marked as a model you know it passed through certain studio validations and you can expect it to be up to the studio standard, however, mayaScene doesn't provide the same confidence (because it's less strict during publishing), even though they might both actually contain the same model.

Following product type definitions and requirements are the AYON defaults and what we consider good industry practice, but most of the requirements can be altered to suit the studio or project needs. Here's a list of supported product types

Model

Clean geometry without any material assignments. Published model can be as small as a single mesh, or as complex as a full building. That is purely up to the artist or the supervisor. Models can contain hierarchy defined by groups or nulls for better organisation.

Example products: modelMain, modelProxy, modelSculpt, modelBroken

Example representations: .ABC, .MA, .MB, .BLEND, .OBJ, .FBX

Look

A package of materials, shaders, assignments, textures and attributes that collectively define a look of a model for rendering or preview purposes. This can usually be applied only to the model is was authored for, or its corresponding cache, however, material sharing across multiple models is also possible. A look should be fully self-contained and ready for rendering.

Example products: lookMain, lookProxy, lookWet, lookDirty, lookBlue, lookRed

Example Representations: .MA + .JSON, .MTLX (yet unsupported), .BLEND

Please note that a look is almost never a single representation, but a combination of multiple. For example in Maya a look consists of .ma file with the shaders, .json file which contains the attributes and assignments and /resources folder with all the required textures.

Rig

Characters or props with animation controls or other parameters, ready to be referenced into a scene and animated. Animation Rigs tend to be very software specific, but in general they tend to consist of Geometry, Bones or Joints, Controllers and Deformers. AYON in maya supports both, self-contained rigs, that include everything in one file, but also rigs that use nested references to bring in geometry, or even skeleton. By default we bake rigs into a single file during publishing, but that behaviour can be turned off to keep the nested references live in the animation scenes.

Example products: rigMain, rigMocap, rigSim, rigCamera, rigMuscle

Example Representations: .MA, .MB, .BLEND, .HDA

Assembly

A product created by combining two or more smaller products into a composed bigger asset. A good example would be a restaurant table asset with the cutlery and chairs included, that will eventually be loaded into a restaurant Set. Instead of loading each individual fork and knife for each table in the restaurant, we can first prepare assemblyRestaurantTable product which will contain the table itself, with cutlery, flowers, plates and chairs nicely arranged.

This table can then be loaded multiple times into the restaurant for easier scene management and updates.

Extracted assembly doesn't contain any geometry directly, but rather information about all the individual products that are inside the assembly, their version and transformations. On top of that and alembic is exported which only holds any extra transforms and groups that are needed to fully re-create the original assembled scene.

Assembly can also be used as a sort of collection of elements that are often used together in the shots. For example if we're set dressing lot's of forest shots, it would make sense to make and assembly of all the forest elements for scattering so we don't have to load them individually into each shot.

Example products: assemblyTable, assemblyForestElements, assemblyRoof

Example Representations: .ABC + .JSON

Setdress

Fully prepared environment scene assembled from other previously published assets. Setdress should be ready for rendering as is, including any instancing, material assignments and other complex setups the environment requires. Due to this complexity, setdress is currently only publishable in the native file format of the host where it was created. In maya that would be .ma or .mb file.

Camera

Clean virtual camera without any proprietary rigging, or host specific information. Considering how widely across the hosts published cameras are used in production, published camera should ideally be as simple and clean as possible to ensure consistency when loaded into various hosts.

Example Representations: .MA, .ABC

Pointcache

Geometry with baked animation. Cache is usually exported as alembic, but can be potentially any other representation that makes sense in the given scenario. Cache is defined by the artist directly in the fx or animation scene.

Example products: assemblyTable, assemblyForestElements, assemblyRoof

Example Representations: .ABC, .BGEO

Animation

Published result of an animation created with a rig. Animation can be extracted as animation curves, cached out geometry or even fully animated rig with all the controllers.
Animation cache is usually defined by a rigger in the rig file of a character or by FX TD in the effects rig, to ensure consistency of outputs.

Example products: animationBob_01, animationJack_02, animationVehicleA

Example Representations: .MA, .ABC, .JSON

Yeti Cache

Cached out yeti fur simulation that originates from a yeti rig applied in the shot context.

Yeti Rig

Yeti groom setup ready to be applied to a cached out character in the shot context.