Tim Lehr

Introduction

Scarif is a new set of production tools for VFX / animation pipelines as well as realtime- and game productions. It is designed with flexibility and ease-of-use in mind and based on ideas and experiences made with the LuTi pipeline tools. The core of Scarif is tool agnostic and able to run on all major operating systems (Linux, macOS, Windows). The tools are database-driven (MySQL) and will be able to track assets and their dependencies throughout the entire production. Another major feature will be the ability to store, access and sync assets between multiple remote locations. This will allow artists / freelancers to work remotely from home, a feature often requested from students at Filmakademie. For DCC integrations, we plan on supporting Maya, Houdini and Nuke in the first release and include more tools later on. As more and more projects at Filmakademie are including realtime components, Scarif will also include basic asset management tools for Unity and Unreal.

Main features:

• Easy setup / artist-friendly tools
• Database-backed
• Asset dependency tracking
• Cross-platform compatibility
• Flexible asset storage (decentralized)

Team:  Tim Lehr (Lead Developer), Lukas Gotkowski

Development

Scarif is in active development since October 2017. At the moment, Scarif is being actively developed for four Filmakademie diploma films, which are due to April 2019 and range from VFX to 3D animation. I am currently wrapping up development on the backend framework / -tools and we will start with the first DCC integration into Autodesk Maya in April 2018.

Development Preview: Project Management Demo Video

Scarif is using a YAML project file to store basic configuration data, while all project dependent data and settings are stored in the project MySQL database. Each project has it’s own virtual environment / code base, which is locally installed on the machine of each user. Deployment is done via a combination of Git and PIP and as easy as a press of a button. The initial project setup is fully guided and allows the user to choose from different presets to get the project up and running in no-time. The database credentials are stored fully encrypted, so even if the project files are getting into the wrong hands, the team password is still needed to access it.

Management tools

Although my primary focus up until now were the backend modules, the following section is highlighting some of the frontend applications I have been working on over the last couple of months.