Shotgun Software announces winners of Pipeline awards

Shotgun Software announces winners of Pipeline awards

Shotgun Software has made public the winners of its fourth annual Pipeline Awards that recognises outstanding achievement in pipeline tool development.

This year’s winners showed innovation in overcoming common challenges faced by VFX and animation studios, efficiency in scaling to meet the demands of large-scale projects and generosity in making their tools open source to be leveraged by the wider community.

This year’s winners are:

DreamWorks Animation for the DWATV Credits Tool

DreamWorks originally designed this tool to streamline credits by tracking and spell checking the names and titles of thousands of people working across DreamWorks Animation. This eventually grew to also track approvals and revision history. The DWATV Credits Tool now connects to Shotgun and is one of the studio’s most widely-used tools, as it bridges communication across the studio.

Chris Bennett, lead animation pipeline TD-Television from DreamWorks Animation accepted this year’s Shotgun Pipeline Award for their DWATV Credits Tool.

High-five to the team at DreamWorks Animation!

Visual Concepts for the NBA 2K17 Facial Animation Pipeline

Time is precious, and the team at Visual Concepts found a way to save a whole lot of it by automating previously manual tasks including tracking video, solving data, converting data to the proper format for the game, generating review material, and notifying supervisors for review and approval. With that long list of automated tasks, we’re wishing we had a pipeline to do our housework!

The new automated pipeline handles thousands of tasks each day, saving time for artists and allowing them to complete the vast majority of facial animation in-house. This ultimately gives them greater control over the final product.

Congrats to the team at Visual Concepts on saving the day (probably several!)

Psyop for Cryptomatte

VFX studio Psyop took home the final Shotgun Pipeline Award for Cryptomatte, which automatically creates ID mattes using information already available at render time including names, object namespaces, and material names. It also supports motion blur, transparency, and depth of field. Recently Psyop’s “Cryptomatte Committee” expanded the tool to the wider community by making an open standard Cryptomatte integrated with Nuke, and AIShaders for Arnold.

Andy Jones, head of VFX, and Jonah Friedman, software engineer, from Psyop accepted the Shotgun Pipeline Award for Cryptomatte.

Mad props to the team at Psyop!

Congrats again to all our winners!

For more information, visit at Shotgun Software