When I joined Masonry Studios back in 2023, I had the opportunity to automate and streamline a lot of the mundane tasks in their pipeline, this page is a showcase of some of the tools I built for the studio during my time there.
Masonry Browser
The “Masonry Browser” is the shot manager I developed for the studio which the artists use manage their working files.
This application covers everything from asset creation to compositing, and works across multiple DCCs (Maya, Houdini, Nuke) as well as standalone.
Creation of assets and shots folder structures is handled through the application. Files are saved and versioned using the browser which ensures correct naming convention across the studio.
Upon opening a file through the application, the appropriate Maya Project or File Variables (Houdini) is set.
Files within Maya can be automatically picked up and referenced from the browser.
For assets, this means that upon initializing the shading and rig files, that the published file from the previous discipline would be picked up as a reference.
In animation, published assets can be referenced easily from the “Assets” tab.
And in lighting, animation files are picked up as a reference. There is a button to check for the latest animation file, which would replace the reference if a newer file exists.
Files saved and viewed through the browser support additional metadata, such as comments and publisher for each file, and thumbnails for each asset/shot.
Thumbnails can be easily set using an image from the clipboard, either through the menu or by simply pasting (Ctrl + V).
The browser also serves as an easy way to create and manage playblasts/flipbooks from Maya/Houdini respectively. It is also possible to have more than 1 playblast per file, if given an additional file name suffix.
Maya Deadline Submitter
At Masonry, we used Thinkbox Deadline for our render farm.
The default Deadline submitter for Maya is a little more comprehensive than we would need in most cases, and so I wrote a separate submitter which stripped out a lot of the features we don’t use and auto-filled some fields using information from the Maya Scene itself.
This submitter also includes an “Import All” toggle, which will import all references in the file and save it out to a temporary “render file” so that things don’t break mid-render when one of the referenced maya files is updated.
Nuke Writes
Custom write nodes were created to simplify the exporting process in Nuke.
TCL expressions were used to ensure that the output is using the correct naming convention.
There are buttons on the node to quickly copy/open the file directory, as well as a “File Suffix” field, if the user needs to differentiate more than 1 output from the nuke file.
There is also an easy way to submit to Deadline on the Write node itself, this gives the artist a way to store their submission settings per write node as well as simplifying the submission process.
Submission to the farm through the EXR Write Node can also create pending JPG and MP4 jobs, which will automatically unlock when the EXR job is done.
Nuke Precomp
When working with heavy comps, we needed a way to easily manage writing and reading precomped EXR sequences. I made this “Masonry Precomp” node, which is inspired by Houdini’s Filecache node, to do exactly that.