When I publish e.g. an animation review/playblast, I need to rely on Viewport 2.0 to playblast my sequence correctly as it is publishing. A successful playblast while needing to have all the viewport bells and whistles turned on for a directors review is often a hit or miss if it playblasts correctly. Being able to review obvious errors or mistakes in the data before publishing it to other people can be very helpful.
This happens in many other departments where you want to create your data in a work context and then be able to review it before you commit to promoting it as published data onwards to the next person. This option, to publish a pre-rendered render, has been available to compers in the past. That is great.
Iām not suggesting removing the ability to render/cache/playblast directly to a publish folder if you are confident in your data to be created as you expect. Iām only suggesting adding it as an option across all/most publish types to have the ability to pick pre-made data from a work folder.
A suggestion would be to add a āWriteā tap to the Ayon publisher. There you can write your ācreatesā out on the farm or locally just as you would publish, but to a pipeline defined work folder. There you can review it. Then, in the Publish tab, you could pick unpublished data (from work) to be moved/promoted to publish or select to create the data as you publish just like it does currently.
This ability to review your data before publishing would make sense for most data and departments except for maybe e.g. rigging, since that is a .ma save operation but could also be an option. But for a fx artist to review his sim before a lighter can hit update in his scene, a lighting artist being able to review their render before a comper hits update on all nodes or an animator to be able to see their playblasts before publishing would be awesome.