I’m new to Ayon, where to start?

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If you have just learned about us and have no idea where to start, then you have come to the right place as I will be your first guide.

Who are we and what is Ayon ?

You may have already heard about us but you can also learn the full story from our CEO himself @milan

Where to get Ayon ?

There are two ways to get AYON.

  1. Ynput Cloud, our favorite solution to get started!
  2. Deploy it yourself on premises.

Ynput Cloud

With our Ynput cloud, you are just a few clicks away from deploying your own AYON server.

Check our pricing Ayon Pricing - Ynput
We also provide free trials :wink:

Deploy it yourself

Ayon is Opensource and you can download it from our github directly!
For ease of deployment, we provide Ayon as a docker container.
Find it here ayon-docker

Deploying AYON server yourself requires some technical skills.

Quick Docker Tutorial

You only need to learn two docker commands to get Ayon up and running:

sudo docker compose pull
sudo docker compose up -d

There are also two useful commands for debugging:

  1. Print the docker server logs:
    sudo docker compose logs -t -n 1000 server
  2. Print the current ayon release info.
    sudo docker compose exec server cat RELEASE

Deploy Ayon

There are many guides that aim to help you achieve these goal.
Feel free to follow the guide that works for you.

Configure your Ayon and Install Ayon Launcher

The main goal to set up your AYON server as well as download Ayon Launcher on user machines and maybe publish your first asset!

Bootstrap your AYON server.

Bootstrap is a fast and automated setup for AYON server.
It fetches AYON launcher, addons, dependency packages and some tools.

It requires to connect to Ynput Cloud

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Download Ayon Launcher

Once you finish bootstrap, you will be able to download Ayon Launcher on artist machines.
For more info: Getting started with AYON | AYON Docs

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Checkpoint 1: You have a running server, yay! :partying_face:

By this step you should have a running Ayon server and you can find your Ayon launcher in tray.
Why don’t you try to create your first project and try publishing your first asset ?

Checkpoint 2: Up and running, go play! :crayon: :soccer:

By this step, you would like to get your hands dirty and test Ayon as much as you can

  • Create projects
  • Edit Settings
  • Test many DCCs
  • Create and publish different product types

You might also start some development, e.g. make a validator optional.

Key Concepts

You can go through Key concepts glossary | AYON Docs
but, let’s emphasize one key concept: Product-Types Vs Representations
Essentially, any product (published data) in ayon consists two piece of information product-type and representation.
let say you want to publish a 3d camera and you want to publish it as alembic.
So, the product-type here is camera , the representation is alembic.

For newcomers it can turn into a long debate especially if they are used to deal with representations as product types! e.g. A Houdini artist who used to refer to point cache as just alembic (I was that Houdini artist :slightly_smiling_face:).

For more info check,

Ayon Publishing Process

In Ayon’s core, you will find image pyblish. That explains why Ayon is working in a similar manner to pyblish

You can find alot of demos in our docs, e.g.

If you are wondering how to add new product-types, check this guide AYON / Openpype Publish process - Development guide

How to collaborate as a developer

Let say you implemented a new logic and you want to add it to code base as your contribution.
Here you are some guidelines.

  1. fork the repo you want to contribute to it.
  2. create new branch
  3. push your branch into your forked github repo
  4. Head to the original repo’s Pull Requests tab and hit New pull request

Note That:
we follow gitflow like naming conventions you should use a descriptive name for your branches.
it’s recommended to use the following branch name prefixes:

  • feature/ : when adding new features
  • enhancement/ : when adding enhancements to an existent feature
  • bugfix/ : when fixing a bug
  • tests/ : when making tests
  • chore/ : when doing something chore like moving a function from a library to another.

How to share your ideas

what if you have a cool idea and you want to share it with us.
Well, Head directly to ideas category Ideas - Ynput community and start sharing!

Learning Resources

you can find us on many platforms where you can find many resources to learn from them or ask the developers directly.

Next Steps

In my opinion, It depends on your role whether you are and artist or an admin or a developer.
Actually, our documentation was designed to reflect these roles

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So, what could be your next steps ?

  • Artist : Learn more about how your DCC integration works and how to use it properly.
  • Admin : Learn more about Ayon Administration and how to master Ayon settings.
  • Developer : [WIP]
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