Vortex

This is the website for Vortex, a pipeline platform designed primarily for the digital film and animation industry

The Pipeline

Vortex is a platform tool designed to consolidate the features of a complex animation/vfx pipeline into a single unified interface. The focus of the tool is on portability, scalability, and maintaining a small infrastructure footprint within a heterogeneous environment. The tool is broadly scoped and aimed at multiple scales of production, from individual to large size studios. Managing work and data flow within a complex system is a daunting task for users at many levels, and this tool aims to simplify both the daily and overall interactions for users (from crew to management).

Implementation of a pipeline with the tool is two-fold. Vortex provides a few built in systems (custom file views, versioning, role management, task management, cross platform interoperability, queue management, scalable database backend, 3rd party software access, API), but otherwise acts as a development platform upon which to build more complex pipeline methods.

The tool is the result of more than 20 collective years of development and pipeline building at various size studios, and is advised by a small committee of pipeline developers, producers and users. It is cross-platform, Python based with a strong dependency on Qt.

The Blog

The blog is a public documentation of the Vortex development.  Our focus will be two-fold: platform building, and implementation/design.  Implementation is centered around Danish film and commercial productions (one feature, one short, and a number of short-format commercial projects), but may come to include other projects, as time and funding allows.  This project is made possible by various private and public investors.  As appropriate, we will list these investors here.

Technologies

Vortex is powered by the following technologies

• Python
• Qt/PyQt
• Mercurial
• MongoDB
• RabbitMQ