Siddhant Sawkar
Automated Time and Activity Tracking System for VFX Production Pipelines
Summary
In the global Visual Effects (VFX) industry, accurately tracking artist work hours is a significant challenge, often leading to pay disparities and inefficient project management. Manual logging methods are frequently unreliable and fail to capture the nuances of a creative workflow.
This project introduces a bespoke, automated time and activity tracking system designed specifically for VFX pipelines to address this issue. The system provides artists, studios, and freelancers with a clear and verifiable record of work hours by integrating directly into core creative software.
The system features:
- Client-Server Architecture: A robust backend built with the Flask web framework manages all data, sessions, and authentication from a central SQLite database.
- Direct DCC Integration: The system plugs directly into Autodesk Maya and Blender, leveraging their native Python APIs to monitor user activity without disrupting the creative workflow.
- Intelligent Idle Detection: A background threading process automatically detects user inactivity, ensuring only active work time is recorded for billing, which significantly improves data accuracy.
- Artist Reporting Dashboard: A standalone desktop application built with Tkinter provides artists with a clear, visual breakdown of their logged hours and tasks using charts generated by Matplotlib and Pandas.
- Web-Based Manager Dashboard: A responsive web interface offers managers a high-level view of studio productivity, with tools for filtering data by artist or date and exporting reports to CSV for further analysis.
Technical Stack:
- Backend: Python, Flask, SQLite
- DCC Integration: Blender Python API (bpy), Maya Python API (maya.cmds)
- Artist Client: Python, Tkinter, Pandas, Matplotlib
- Manager Dashboard: HTML, Tailwind CSS, JavaScript, Chart.js
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