Introduction

Blender Studio has been creating short films (open movies) and other open content for over 15 years, using Blender as the primary tool. An important goal of the open movies is to test and validate the functionality of Blender in the hands of a small team.

Over the years –while contributing to Blender's design and development– the studio has developed a set of extensions and tools around Blender, which enable a more efficient collaboration. When combined, these tools could be considered the "Blender Studio pipeline".

The goal of this documentation is to describe the tools and IT setup used at Blender Studio, in a way that can be replicated in another environment, from scratch.

The documentation features different types of content: guides, references, and design docs.

Guides

Guides are aimed at two audiences:

• users/artists learning how to perform certain workflows
• TDs learning how to deploy and maintain the pipeline in a production environment

Guides are detailed series of instructions that start from the topics described in the Design Docs and deal with them in a practical way. For example:

• Workstation reference
• Workflows (like Design Docs above, but the practical steps). Depending on the type of production, workflows often need to be changed and tweaked. That part can better be documented on the Blender Studio blog.
• Media Viewer reference
• Infrastructure setup (how to build a studio IT from scratch)

For "external" tools like Flamenco or Kitsu, the idea is to explain the specific use or customization we do a Blender Studio and refer to the official documentation for the rest. For example: "Install Kitsu by following the official guide".

References

References are docs for specific tools (for example add-ons), detailing the meaning and functioning of each option or operator available.

Design Docs

Design docs are explanations and insight on how tools are designed and built in a certain way, and how they are meant to be used.

License and Credits

All software available as part of the Blender Studio Tools is released under the GNU General Public License v2 or later. A comprehensive list of authors and contributors is available in the AUTHORS file in the git repository.