Dag graphs for VFX workflows

DAG graphs should be familiar to most VFX artists. They are the foundational structure that on which most VFX scenes are built. Maya, Houdini, Nuke, and several other 3D apps use dependency graphs (of which DAG graphs are a subset) to structure scene files.

In a Maya scene for example, you may have a sphere, an animated deformer, some lights, a shading network, and a camera. Each of these elements is a node in the scene graph. The renderer draws pixels on the screen by traversing the scene graph and evaluating data for each of these nodes.

While the above scenario all happens in one app, the concept applies to the entire VFX pipeline spanning multiple apps, people, and departments. As the breadth of the VFX pipeline grows, the individual nodes that make up that pipeline are typically more compute intensive, sometimes requiring specialized hardware, and can therefore benefit greatly from being distributed across multiple machines.

Conductor is a workflow orchestration tool that is purpose built for VFX and animation worklfows. It provides a framework for building and scaling your VFX pipeline.