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. “Our community acts as a glue code for all the data that is produced within.”
Ayon 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 an in-house tool development project 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.
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, Ynput has ventured into production support, consulting as well as training.
Ynput releases new versions of its software roughly once a month and plans to work on review tools for desktop reviews.
Given the global nature of the animation and VFX industry, Ynput’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 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.
