Thanks for the fast reply Simon, very interesting post. I totally agree about the importance of file structure and conventions, asset management is another big one.
What brings this up... Partly I've been thinking about this stuff for years, but recently I began sorting thru scenes to put examples up on my site for newer ICE artists and have been re-organizing a lot of my assets, compounds etc with an eye for isolating out the good stuff and sharing it. I also had an experience not too long ago with a smallish studio (30-40 people) which has bought a few seats of Softimage and is setting up a "beginners" Softimage pipeline alongside their regular Maya one (which is also getting an overhaul) with an eye towards bringing their artists up to speed with ICE etc. Part of that involved setting up Alembic for asset exchange, some scene saving automation (enforcing file names) and the like. So it got me thinking in terms of what small enhancements bring the most bang for the buck and what exactly constitutes pipeline... With big facilities its a bit easier, because at a certain scale it makes sense to build significant structure, and needs are usually readily apparent. But an idealized pipeline/toolset gets a little vague when you are talking smaller teams and facilities, or even the single artist. Yet when I look at my own setup at home, there's a fair bit of customization. It would be interesting to try to identify the things pretty much every user ends up making for themselves, like rename scripts and similar tools, or assets like light rigs, staging scenes, camera rigs and the like.
