On my free time, during my internship at Mainframe London, i began a pipeline in python for maya !
I knew i'll have to work with classmates the next year, so my main goal was to make every steap much more easier, to help people working clean (yeah, maybe i'm a bit maniac with work .... ^^).
I took a lot from Martin Gunnarson, at Mainframe, in london, and from the pipeline of the french studio ChezEddy, and learnt with Tom Fonvillars, who did pretty much the same pipeline, for the same reasons than me =)
I can't show every option in detail, because i spent a lot of time to develop it, and i added as much option as needed, but i'll try to sum up !
So this is the main window, when you create your project ! The upper part is for navigation, whereas the lower part is for dealing with the selected or opened item.
When you go to the main menu, the "Pipeline" menu, you can choose to create a new project, set a project, or change Artist : by default, every file saved on a computer contains the name of it creator. So for this example, my artist name is "vincent touache", so every file i'll create through the pipeline will be like this : "filename_vt.mb". It's very useful to know who did what !
In your explorer, it's very easy : your project is divided into 6 parts.
I don't want to give too much details on every other part, for now, the "2_PROD" is the only important =)
So if i open 2_PROD folder, the content is the same than what i see in maya ! 21_MODELING, 22_RIGGING, etc ! There is a whole system with the numbers as prefix, but maybe a bit complicated to be explained here in a few lines =)
When you click on "New", under the right column, you can create a new item. Basically, an item is every element you need.. a character, a prop, etc, but also, in animation or render, a shot !
everytime you save a version 002, maya checks if a snapshot has already been created. If not, it'll create automatically =) But you still can make another one if you want !
you can also add notes for your co-workers ! By clicking on the FileInfo button, you create a text file, attached to an item, where you can write whatever you want ! Once it's done, a small "i" stands next to your item, to warn people that there is some informations to read about this item !
once you've finished working, and your file is ready to be referenced or imported, ready to be opened by other people, you need to create a Master ! This is the "clean" file, no history, no unnamed elements, nothing dirty ! When you create your master, you have a small window (sorry for the ugly interface, not had time yet to make it more friendly ^^), allowing you to import references (to avoid ref of ref), deleting history, exporting every item as an obj smoothed at 2 (for Mari), etc etc. You can import/reference masters and only masters in your scene, never versions !
Once it's done, your item has a M next to it, to tell that a master already exists, and the item is ready for being referenced (notice the little "i" of the file info, just next to the "M")
Finally, you have many many shortcuts to jump from maya to explorer ! And you can edit your shortcuts, if you don't want to work like me ^_^ for example, you can set a Trash folder (every item deleted is actually moved into the Trash folder), you can choose your planning folder, etc....
And that's all ! This is just a veeeeeery very small sum up of what is possible with this pipeline, i took one month to do it, and one year to test it, so i added many many options during this year of test !
