Cliff Plumer. All images courtesy of Lucasfilms.

Given the opening of the Letterman Digital Arts Center in San Francisco’s Presidio, the new home of Lucasfilm, Industrial Light & Magic and LucasArts, along with subsequent announcements such as HP becoming Lucasfilm’s preferred technology provider and ZBrush being added to the ILM pipeline, VFXWorld invited Barbara Robertson to dig a little deeper with Lucasfilm cto Cliff Plumer.

Barbara Robertson: We’ve been hearing a lot about new software that you call Zeno. What does it do?

Cliff Plumer: At the core of Zeno is a scene file; that’s our proprietary file. We’ve built all our proprietary tools on top of that platform and integrated commercial tools within it.

In the past, the core of ILM’s pipeline was based on Softimage, a commercial 3D application, and that created obstacles because once you have to translate between apps, it increases the complexity of the pipeline. Things didn’t translate easily and we’d be stuck in middle trying to get software programs to support each other. It took a lot of technical administration to manage files and move them between multiple applications.

Now, Zeno is the hub; it handles the file conversion. That’s all transparent to the artists.

If someone is working on a model in Maya, they can click on a button that says “copy.” And then go into Zeno and paste it. It’s literally like a cut and paste function. Once in Zeno, we have full control over all the files. Some people might think that doesn’t sound innovative, but in CG, that’s huge. It makes everything more efficient. It’s at the foundation of what we changed in the CG pipeline.

BR: What else changed in the pipeline?

CP: The other key with Zeno is that the tools are modules — and we keep developing modules. With a large 3D application, you load all the controls at once, and that’s a lot of overhead. With the Zeno architecture, the artists use only the tool needed for a task, whether they’re doing lighting, creature rigging or animation. These are all modules in Zeno; it adds a lot more efficiency. And, by having all those things integrated in Zeno, there is more collaboration among different types of artists.

BR: How does Zeno allow more collaboration?

CP: We have what we call asset management and production tracking tools integrated within Zeno. The pipe used to be an assembly line. X would hand the project to Y down the pipeline. If something changed, they had to update the pipeline through every single process manually. We used to have problems with renders — if someone was not using the current version, it would break.

Now, artists can make changes and they are automatically updated throughout the pipeline. If I’m an artist using a number of assets, I don’t need a production coordinator to tell me the status of an asset. When an artist works on an asset, it’s automatically updated and everyone is using the current version. Instead of having an army of PA’s with clipboards, everything is all online and automated. We can have artists collaborating on the same file in realtime.

The feature wars ended a long time ago. Now, it’s about workflow; about getting tools into artists’ hands that are integrated under one user interface.

BR: Was this made possible because of faster hardware?

CP: Well, we’re not dependant on particular hardware, but we’re designing what we want to do to take advantage of fast hardware.

In the past, we were limited by the bandwidth at the old ILM campus. That network was, in general, 100Mb to the desk and 1GB in the backbone. We’ve scaled that up by a factor of 10. Every artist has one gig to the desk and 10GB is the backbone infrastructure.