Tangent Labs

The LoUPE Story

With 2016’s low-budget feature Ozzy effectively serving as a Proof of Concept, work began at Tangent Animation on the Asset Manager — the core component of LoUPE — and preparation for the higher budgeted NextGen. With Tangent Labs CEO Jeff Bell’s relentless drive to build efficient systems and challenge the status quo he set out to actualize a plan he’d long ago conceived, namely to create a single pipeline tool that was designed with user experience at the forefront, and enough flexibility to run right out of the box or be as extensible as user resources and know-how allow. In short, he was tired of reinventing the wheel and building yet another asset manager and knew others were too.

While many were scratching their heads at the potentially loopy mavericks over at Tangent Animation setting out to make a feature entirely in Blender, the sale of NextGen to Netflix at Cannes in May 2018 and its subsequent launch on Netflix in September 2018 put an end to the skeptics. LoUPE was born of a desire to capitalize on modern UI and cloud technologies, so a like-minded team with decades of experience in building production pipeline tools was formed. Augmented by a diverse team of front-end Engineers, Business Development, Sales, and Marketing professionals, Tangent Labs was born in 2018 with the goal of commercializing LoUPE for use by the community. A modern front-end Task Management system tightly integrated with both Asset Management and a built-in web-based Review & Collaboration tool was created, with an oData connection for live reporting and analytics and Virtual Workstation capable.

With an extraordinarily tight timeline on NextGen due to the sale to Netflix, Tangent Animation was quickly thrown into cloud rendering in order to supplement on-premise resources to produce the large number of frames required. This experience clearly demonstrated the pain points of a studio’s path to the cloud, so LoUPE was designed to package up our hard-won lessons in order to assist a studio to continue to wring value out of their existing on-premise resources and augment with the cloud on an as-needed basis to provide an efficient transition path over the months or years that on-prem resources still hold value.

Blender is the 3D package of choice for Tangent Studios and we believe that it’s the future, and we’re encouraged by the number of artists and studios that are interested in, experimenting with, and starting to incorporate Blender into their pipelines. While LoUPE was originally designed specifically with Blender in mind and it will always be our first tool among many, we’ve listened to the community who loudly voiced a need to ease into Blender in much the same way that they’ll ease into cloud rendering. With that valuable feedback in mind, LoUPE includes native plug-ins for the major packages and ever-increasing USD support.

LoUPE is Storytelling Simplified, allowing an artist with a great idea to tell their story. LoUPE is By Artists, For Artists and allows you to focus on putting your energies into what shows up on the screen and leave the boring technical bits to us.