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.
