Workflow vs Pipeline

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by Anne Dolmans, Pixel-Nexus | 23 October 2024

The terms pipeline and workflow are often muddled together, without a clear understanding of where one ends and the other begins. There is however a key difference between these two terms, which is important to highlight when talking about optimising productions. This short article will go over how we distinguish them.

Workflow

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A workflow is a series of actions, performed to complete a specific task. It is everything the artist does individually, to get to the end result.

This includes everything from choosing which software to use, to the artists favourite tools and what project structure is set up.

For example, an artist gets the task to make a 3D model of a sci-fi crate. Their preferred software is Blender, so they use this to make the model. They have their set of modelling tools and plugins that they like to use to complete the task. On top of the artists personal preferences, the production has conventions on naming and project structure they need to follow. Since the artist needs to check for these conventions every single time they make a model, there is some room for automatization. They could use a tool called a sanity checker that checks the work they did on these conventions, instead of them having to do it manually every time. This not only speeds up their workflow, but it also takes away the opportunity for human error, leading to a cleaner output of the task.

Anything the artist chooses to use and do to finish their specific task amounts to the workflow. The workflow can be optimised by making tools for certain steps, like a sanity checker.

Pipeline

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When a series of tasks is divided between different people, there is a need to be able to use the output of one task, as the input of another. A pipeline is there to connect different tasks. It comes in when the artist has completed their task, and the output of the artist's workflow has to be processed. The pipeline takes the result of said artist’s workflow and makes sure all the data is managed in the correct way.

More specifically, this means that the task's status is saved in a database, as well as all its versions, which version is approved, who made that version, and all other data needed to keep everything sorted. It also saves the files so all artists who need to access it can do so.

To use the same example as before, before starting the task of modelling the crate, the concept art had to be made and passed along to the modeller. After the model is finished, the crate needs to be textured, which means the output of the modelling task needs to be passed along as the input of the texturing task. The pipeline ensures that all the correct files are passed along to the next department, leaving little room for miscommunication on which version to use.

CONCEPT MODEL TEXTURES

Summary

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The workflow is everything the artists choose to do to complete their individual tasks. The pipeline is there to connect all the different steps in a production with a minimal amount of miscommunication.