Research into Referencing

In the previous post we faced a bottle necking problem in the pipeline that slowed down productivity and also didn't allow the flexibility to evolve ideas.

Myself, Ollie and Greg sat and discussed methods of improving our pipeline and stumbled across a topic in Maya called referencing.

Similar methods are used in industry to allow overlapping of work rather than the 'ast job finishes and the next job begins' approach which seems ameture and unprofessional.

From the research that we had done, it seemed that referencing was a very simple cocept that would solve many of our problems. Take the example of the link between modelling and rigging. A draft of the model is passed on to the rigger who starts rigging.

Instead of physically imorting the moddling data into his rigging file, he simply references it at a certai path loction on the computer. The name and the location of this file is very important. Now lets say that a week later the moddler has made some additions/modifications to the model. The rigger should simply need to take the new moddling file, replace the old model reference with the new one. Now when the rigger has opened his rigging file, it will update with the new version of the model. Now the rigger can continue to develop the rig without having lost any of the work he did to the old version.

The same concept can be applied to animation. So the animators can recieve a rig draft. They start animating using the rig reference file. Some time later the rigger may come back with a more detailed version of the rig which can replace the old one and then be used for more animation to build on the previous work.



This allows the modeller, rigger, tracking artists, animators to be working on there individual aspects for a greater duration of the project. This will results in greater productivity, a more flexible product with a much lower risk of failure to meet a deadline.

Here are some websites that allowed us to understand the referencing concept to a greater level.

http://www.3dfiggins.com/writeups/mayaReference/


This video also greatly assisted me in my initial understanding.




However my greatest resource in understanding more about referncing was digital tutors. I used many of their tutorials to help me see referncings uses and practical implementations.