Animation pipeline: key steps, challenges and tools

Animators are artists. 

But being part of a successful animation team takes more than a creative mind. You also need to be a pro at juggling multiple moving pieces behind the scenes.

If it feels like you’re spending more time managing workflow logistics than animating, you’re not alone. But investing time in fine-tuning your animation pipeline can free up more time to create long-term. 

Because whether you’re crafting a hand-drawn 2D short, an immersive experience or working on a full-scale 3D production, a solid animation pipeline keeps your team on track.

In this blog, we’ll break down the animation pipeline essentials –– from main stages and common challenges to the tech that can help streamline your animation workflow. 

What is an animation pipeline?

Your animation pipeline is the invisible thread that ties your project together. It’s the step-by-step process that takes you from initial inspiration to fully-rendered final output.

A pipeline gives you the guardrails that keep everyone pulling in the same direction. Avoiding miscommunications, mistakes and saving loads of time along the way.

Most animation production pipelines have their own quirks depending on the project. Ultimately, it’s about crafting a process that lets you focus on what really matters: telling a great story.

Let’s take the Oscar-winning animation, The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse as an example. As a fully-remote production, with over 120 people working across more than 20 countries, the team needed a unique workflow to bring everything together. You can take a peek behind the scenes at the animation’s production secrets here.

The power of an animation pipeline

Even the most creative endeavors need structure. An animation pipeline isn’t about stifling creativity. It’s about providing the lines to color between so your team can get on with the important stuff. 

A solid pipeline ensures every pixel, frame and character is on point, while also helping you meet deadlines. Because most of us don’t have the luxury of infinite time or budgets to perfect our work. And no one wants to pull a The Thief and the Cobbler and spend decades on a single project.

Without a clear animation pipeline, the complexities of animation can spiral out of control. You risk delays, miscommunication and, worst of all, compromised quality.

On the flip side, a well-structured pipeline:

• Organizes your workflow: keeps everyone aligned, knowing exactly what to do and when feedback is coming.

• Improves efficiency: speeds up tasks, while catching potential issues early.

• Increases collaboration: ensures departments like modeling, rigging and animation work seamlessly together, avoiding bottlenecks.

• Maintains quality: keeps the entire production consistent and hitting the highest standards.

So, what does an animation pipeline actually look like? Let’s look at the stages that take you from rough sketches to fully rendered worlds.

Main stages of the animation pipeline

Each stage of the animation pipeline builds on the last. This is nicely demonstrated in the short clip below from the making of Inside Out.

Your pipeline ensures everything from characters to environments or abstract visuals comes together smoothly. Here’s a breakdown of the stages that help make the magic happen, plus some practical tips to help streamline your animation workflow.

Concept 

Every animation starts with an idea, whether it’s a rough sketch on the back of a napkin, a written concept or even a mood board. At this stage, you’re building the core narrative or concept that will drive the project forward.

Before moving to the storyboard phase, it’s often useful to create concept art — a visual representation of key scenes, characters, or environments. Concept art helps communicate the project’s vision to executives, ensuring that everyone’s on board before deeper production begins.

Top tip: align your concept art with your narrative. It’s also helpful to create mood boards with color palettes or character ideas to give everyone a clear visual target.

Storyboarding

Once the concept is locked in, the next stage is creating a storyboard.

Storyboarding (or wireframing for motion graphics) is like creating a roadmap for your project, guiding the flow, structure and rhythm. Even if the final piece doesn’t follow a traditional narrative, this early planning helps ensure your vision is communicated clearly.

If music or sound is involved, it can already be added here to help time the storyboard accordingly.

Top tip: when storyboarding, focus on timing as much as visuals. Each frame should indicate camera angles, movement and even rough timing. Timing your boards will help avoid pacing issues in later stages, especially when transitioning to animatics. Pixar, for example, often tests storyboards in front of audiences to refine timing and flow before moving forward.

Styleframes

In certain types of animation, particularly motion graphics or explainer videos, creating styleframes after storyboarding is essential. These are final-look visualizations of one or a few frames from the storyboard, rendered with full colors, textures and visual treatments.

Styleframes help the director, client or executives see what the final animation will look like, ensuring there are no surprises in later stages. You can propose a couple of color palettes or character stylings to make sure everything is aligned before full production.

Top tip: styleframes save time and effort by locking in the overall style and look before animating all frames.

Character and asset development (2D animation)

For 2D animations, this stage involves creating character model sheets. These sheets present the characters from every angle (a 360-degree view) and include different facial expressions, poses and any other important details. These serve as reference points for animators and ensure consistency across the project.

Top tip: model sheets also help the animators maintain scale and proportion throughout scenes. Include turnarounds and pose breakdowns to provide clarity during animation.

Modeling (3D animation)

In 3D animation pipelines, this is the architecture stage. It’s time to build characters or virtual landscapes using tools like Maya and Blender to turn your creative vision into something tangible. 

Modeling shapes the environments and objects that anchor your audience, grounding them in the world you’re creating, be it a traditional animation or an experiential design.

Top tip: create models that strike a balance between detail and efficiency. Too much detail can bog down rendering times. Build assets modularly (e.g. creating reusable environment pieces), so you can recycle elements across scenes and projects. This speeds up production and keeps everything cohesive.

Texturing and rigging

Texturing breathes life into the details — from the texture of a character’s skin and the subtle touches in an environment, down to the fine elements in motion graphics. 

Rigging makes movement possible. It’s not just about animating characters, but also making sure every element, mechanical or abstract, moves fluidly. Without proper rigging, your characters or elements may move awkwardly, breaking immersion. Tools like Spine help make sure your models move naturally within their world.

Top tip: for texturing, always work with high-resolution textures to future-proof your assets. Even if your project doesn’t require 4K textures now, you’ll be prepared if you need them later. In rigging, focus on flexibility — build rigs that can adapt to changes, so you won’t need to redo everything if the animation or movement evolves.

Animation

This is where the magic happens. Using the likes of Toon Boom Harmony, Moho and Rive for 2D or Cinema 4D for 3D, you’re bringing everything to life. For motion graphics and experiential design, this is the stage where elements interact dynamically with the environment or user, making everything feel alive. 

Top tip: animate in passes. Start with broad motions — blocking out key poses and timing. Then, layer in secondary motions like hair, clothing or environmental effects. This approach ensures smoother animations and helps avoid bottlenecks later in the production.

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse used a layered animation technique, starting with rough sketches and gradually refining them. This let the team focus on nailing the emotional impact of key scenes before fine-tuning details.

Lighting and rendering

Lighting and rendering provide the finishing touches. Lighting sets the mood, be it dramatic or subtle, while rendering gives your scenes a polished, cohesive look.

Rendering, often done with tools like Houdini or Nuke, ensures the final product comes together seamlessly, whether you’re aiming for photorealism or something more stylized.

Top tip: when lighting, start with a three-point lighting setup (key light, fill light and backlight) and then adjust for mood. To save time, render at low resolution early on for previews, then switch to high resolution for the final output.

Compositing and editing

Compositing blends all the layers — characters, effects or abstract elements — into a cohesive whole. Editing (typically done in Premiere Pro or After Effects) is where you refine the pacing, rhythm and energy of the project, ensuring it keeps your audience engaged from start to finish. 

Top tip: during compositing, keep layers organized and labeled properly to avoid confusion in complex scenes. And editing isn’t just about cutting footage — focus on pacing. Even in animated content, rhythm is key to maintaining audience engagement. Use temp sound effects or music to see how scenes will feel with final audio.

Storage and collaboration

Our own addition to the animation pipeline, admittedly. But an overlooked element nonetheless. As we’re about to explore, large animation files can disrupt your team’s animation workflows in a number of ways. To keep each stage of the pipeline flowing, you need a way to collaborate with your team in real time, wherever you’re working.

Top tip: LucidLink powers real-time cloud collaboration for animation production pipelines. Files of any size or type can be accessed instantly from anywhere, so your team can stay aligned at all times.

Want a deep dive into the remote workflow that lets Bemo’s team create amazing animations while working from anywhere? Check out this webinar.

7 common disruptions to your animation production pipeline

Even the smoothest pipelines can hit a few bumps along the way. 

More and more animators are embracing the freedom to collaborate across multiple locations. But this comes with its own technical challenges, which left unaddressed can easily push your animation workflow off track.

1. Accessing media assets and file transfers

High-resolution textures, complex models and intricate animation sequences are crucial. But accessing these huge files remotely can slow everything down. Sending large files and waiting for them to download eats up valuable time. And when internet speeds fluctuate, these delays add up, stopping your team from jumping straight into work.

2. Staying in sync with your team

With teams spread across time zones, ensuring everyone is working on the latest version of a project isn’t always easy. With no centralized place to store your files and keep everyone up to date on the latest version, it’s easy to work on outdated assets and waste valuable time. 

3. Managing local storage and high-resolution files

Animation projects generate huge amounts of data, often pushing the limits of local storage. Managing high-res files locally while trying to keep systems running smoothly can slow down editing and playback. Meanwhile, switching between external drives and media cloud storage is another disruption to your workflow.

4. Remote collaboration tools and virtual machines

Remote work setups promise flexibility, but they don’t always run smoothly. Latency, limited access to powerful workstations and software compatibility issues can interfere with productivity and creative flow.

5. Security and data management

Keeping intellectual property and sensitive project data secure is critical. As teams expand across locations, maintaining data protection best practices while ensuring a smooth workflow is an ongoing challenge.

6. Real-time feedback and iteration

You need rapid feedback loops to move projects along swiftly. But when real-time feedback is delayed by issues managing large files, it makes refining your work harder.

7. Maintaining creative flow

Technical disruptions — whether it’s waiting for large files to load or dealing with tool compatibility issues — pull you out of the creative zone. These small interruptions add up, making it harder to stay focused on bringing your vision to life.

How LucidLink streamlines animation workflows

As we’ve explored, even the best animation tools and workflows can get sidetracked.

Whether it's managing and sharing massive files, slow feedback loops or version control mishaps, these challenges steal creative time. LucidLink’s cloud storage collaboration platform removes these roadblocks, so you can animate without worrying about files.

Instant file access

Animation files are hefty — if you’re waiting for downloads before you can start work, 4K textures, complex 3D models and layered effects can grind your workflow to a halt. 

LucidLink gives animators instant access to files of any size. Our unique file streaming tech breaks up files, delivering the bits you’re working on straight away. So you can open the file and get straight to work.

With over 120 animators spread across 20 countries, real-time access to content was crucial for The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse production. Using LucidLink, the team could share and work on high-resolution files without any delay. Here’s the full story of how our tech helped the Oscar winners work together from anywhere.

Real-time collaboration and updates

Working on outdated files is a huge cause of confusion, delays and frustration. With traditional workflows, syncing files across different team members and tools often leads to bottlenecks. 

LucidLink solves this with a single filespace that’s updated the moment your team makes a change. This ensures everyone can see, access and work on the latest version of a file.

Centralized cloud storage

Managing large animation projects can be daunting, especially when storage is scattered across drives and platforms. LucidLink simplifies this by offering scalable, centralized storage for files of any size or type. Whether it’s ongoing projects or archived content, your entire team works from a single source of truth, no matter where they’re located.

With everything stored in the cloud, your team doesn’t need to store huge files on local systems. Meanwhile, your archived projects can be neatly organized and easily accessible for future updates or re-use.

Here’s how one production team created 50 films in 5 weeks across 21 locations using LucidLink. 

Tell better stories with a structured animation pipeline 

A well-structured animation production pipeline keeps your projects flowing. It’s a framework that helps you hit deadlines –– but more importantly, it lets you focus on animating instead of admin.

As teaming up with talent across different locations becomes more common, collaborating on huge files and ensuring everyone has access to the latest assets is key to smooth workflows. Tools like LucidLink eliminate these potential headaches, so you can maintain an uninterrupted animation pipeline, wherever your team’s working from.

Ready to streamline your animation workflows? Try LucidLink today with a two week free trial.