Dataflow
Rick Hankins, Nick Rasmussen, Andrew Johnson, Stephen D. Bowline, Brice Criswell · 2015
Dataflow is a node-based graph-evaluation system at the core of ILM's visual effects pipeline, and it has been used on dozens of major motion pictures over the past 8 years. It is used for assembling networks of python rules for generating and controlling particle and volume simulations, authoring 3D spatial fields, creating and processing geometry and volumes, instancing geometry for set dressing and vegetation, instancing curve geometry and attributes for hair, instancing of characters and motion for crowds, and much more. It is integrated in Zeno's scene graph and can be used as an evaluation engine through a custom plug-in framework within other applications such as Katana, Maya, and Houdini.