Y.A.M.S.

When I started on Inside Out, one of the character supervisors showed me a rendering setup that they had used on Cars 2. He said he would like something like that for Inside Out. Good Dinosaur had made a rendering solution for characters, but I didn't find it easy to configure, seemed like it was missing features we wanted and it didn't seem easy to extend. So I wrote a solution that got us through the show, but was somewhat adhoc. I based what I was doing on what Monsters University had done, but their setup was also somewhat adhoc.

When I started on Toy Story 4, I wanted a solution that didn't need to be re-written for each show. By this time, the lead from Monsters University was leading Coco and had built another similar system. Based on his look (because I hoped to minimize a learning curve for people in the department so that it would be easy adopt), I built yet another rendering script, which was managed by yet another management script.

The system let you specify which characters or shots you wanted to render, how often you wanted to render them (days of the week), whether you wanted a difference image generated, and how you wanted the renders organized in one of Pixar's review tools. It also had some dependency analysis to see whether a render was necessary (anything in the shot had changed since the last render). It also simplified the act of submitting a rendering by batching together requests for the same shot to reduce duplication.

But the thing that really set it apart from all the other solutions (there was another one written right at the end of Inside Out that they used on Finding Dory) was that the configuration scripts where python. All you needed to do was fill in a few predetermined variables and you would get a decent starting setup (project, sequence, a few render settings). But if (and it really was when) you needed to do something different there were lots of options available and if they didn't work, you could write your own logic to fill in those variables. This logic was used for rendering, comping, image organization for review, and other image processing tasks. The Character Supervisor on Onward told me multiple times how much we appreciated being able to customize his organization exactly how he wanted. I totally agreed with him.

Y.A.M.S. was used on Cars 3, Incredibles 2, Toy Story 4, Onward, and Soul. It maybe in use on other upcoming films. When I left there was talk of a tools overhaul and this problem was likely going to be subsumed in that project.