Pipeline is a crucial aspect of filmmaking in animation, and Ynput, a software company specialising in creative pipeline services, recently showcased its innovations at the MIFA market of the prestigious Annecy International Animation Film Festival.
At the market, the company brought its open-source pipeline platform AYON, tailored for animation, VFX and game studios. AnimationXpress caught up with the Ynput’s founder and CEO Milan Kolar who elaborated on AYON and his company’s vision. “We aim to help studios unlock their creative potential by providing them with a powerful and scalable pipeline, so they can take on more projects without worrying about bandwidth or capacity constraints,” said Kolar.
“AYON can be integrated with any software available in the market currently, including Maya, Houdini, Nuke, Blender, Unreal Engine, TVPaint and many more,” he continued. Hence at Ynput, Kolar’s team is building a big community around this open source solution. “AYON acts as glue for studios in need of a robust studio platform, driven by our developers and the community of contributors around the world.”
The platform specialises in automating pipeline processes for studios. “Our major focus is scalability, design and big ideas,” mentioned Kolar. “AYON can be customised by small-and-midsize studios as well as scale up to a project involving thousands of people.”
Ynput began as a combination of existing open-source libraries and in-house tool development in 2019 and has since grown into a comprehensive service that simplifies and automates workflows for creative teams. Formerly known as Pype.Club, the company was rebranded as Ynput in 2023. The same year, the company’s flagship product OpenPype was rebranded as AYON, to mark a new chapter in its lifetime with a completely re-written modular architecture.
With a team comprising artists, CG supervisors, technical directors (TDs), and software engineers, the company is able to give creative teams a 360-degree overview of pipelines that lets them accelerate workflows. Apart from VFX and animation pipeline service, the company has ventured into production support, consulting as well as training.
Ynput releases new major versions of its software roughly once a month and is currently working on multiple production tracking and review features for online and desktop workflows.
Given the global nature of the animation and VFX industry, the company’s team is spread across the globe. “Our team covers most time zones. Currently, we have clients in the USA, UK, Europe, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa as well as Australia,” Kolar said. “We are getting business leads from India almost on a daily basis.”
Ynput’s debut visit to the Annecy Festival proved fruitful. “We had back to back meetings with studios, schools and potential partners,” shared Kolar.