Ani Colony Pre-Alpha

This is where I try and make sense of Ani Colony to you. The thing about it is that it does everything and the kitchen sink, but in reality it does very little. It's most about perception. And there are a few ways to look at it. So from a technical side, try this:

Technically Speaking, Ani Colony manages visual file inputs for the production of an animated series: performing automatic version control, detailed logging, and resource management. This helps the user (animation-industry-types) get from A to B without having to know how or why. At the root of it are a series of "write locations" (anything from a subdirectory to a RAID) that receive data, a database that keeps track of it all, and an XML schematic that instructs the system how to balance workload. This is nothing that hasn't been done a million times for software dev, and has even been partly implemented for animation as well.

What makes it different is a secondary system that reads the logs and follows the XML and helps manage the system more efficiently. By checking check out/check in times per-user and comparing them to an average, the system can start allocating tasks to specific users to help improve the overall efficiency of the project. Based on history and a projected future, it can estimate final timelines (and budgets, if applicable). And because of its non-linear viewpoint, Ani Colony can kick off principal animation ahead of what a production manager could see alone (e.g. if all the assets needed for 30% of a show are completed first, animation can start even before the rest of the assets are designed).

OSS to OSA. The real goal behind this system is to make it more efficient for an animated project to be made, start to finish. If one of the major hurdles for any distributed Open project is coordination, this system is meant to wipe that out completely. From script to storyboard to assets to final render, this system hand-holds the creators so all they need to worry about is what's next in their queue. It should keep the momentum going so that no one gets bored. As long as the contributors show up, the system will keep things humming.

But along with this tracking comes another useful tool. Every contribution to every asset is logged, as with CVS, so that each of the users who touched that asset has their name attached. The system can therefore give proper attribution for every element of every project being created. If your short film is made up of 20 characters processed by 10 people, you can give each one of those people credit just by requesting a credit list from the system... the tracking is already done, it's just a matter of compiling the list.

The asset library is therefore the most vital part of the system, and this is where Ani Colony stops being a CVS and starts being a community project of sorts. If characters A, B and C are developed for my short film, the final versions of those characters are deposited into the asset library. If I make a sequel to my short, I can immediately pull those assets out and re-use them. But if that asset library were shared among all the projects in the community, other people could "spin off" (or branch, or fork) a character into their own productions. And since the system tracks all attributions silently in the background, when the final credit list is produced, I can be assured my name will be there, too. If we run the system so that all projects must release their "source" under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Attribution Sharealike license, all contributors should feel safe sharing and building upon each other's work. We come to a point where the ideals of free software finally make a plausible leap into creative arts.

There are other issues to this which are more in the realm of philosophy and politics, and for that I point you to the Ani Colony implementation staging area... they're out of the scope of this development project, and I don't want to muddy the waters too much.