Rather than one long day in one city, TPC 2026 runs as two focused half-day events you can join from anywhere, closing out the year with the tenth Pipeline Awards. Dates and speakers are being locked in now — subscribe to our newsletter and you will get the news first.
Half-day one
AI and agentic workflows in digital media pipelines
Agents are turning up in production pipelines faster than anyone has written the rules for them. A half-day on what is actually working: agentic workflows for asset production, the data layers and security model underneath, DevOps and FinOps for AI services, and honest accounts of what broke on the way.
Half-day two
Pipeline engineering and operations at production scale
The unglamorous half of the job, taken seriously: render farms, storage, OpenUSD in anger, cloud adoption, the migrations that take a year, and keeping the whole thing standing while a show is in flight. A day of classic Pipeline Conference content on practical topics that matter, kept apart from the chaos and bustle of new workflows introduced by AI.
December 2026
Closing out the year on the TPC YouTube channel
The tenth Pipeline Awards, as a produced show rather than a line item at the end of a long day. Our awardees' work on screen, each of them speaking to you directly, messages from the judges, and open rooms on Discord afterwards so you can talk to the people whose tools you depend on.
The Pipeline Conference is the flagship event of the Digital Production Pipeline Association, a community that spans more than 50 studios and 40 countries across animation, VFX, games and immersive media. It keeps going year-round through our online speaker series, technical roundtables, Discord and the pipeline sessions we coordinate at SIGGRAPH and GDC.
TPC is by engineers for engineers — the board, organisers and volunteers all work in pipeline engineering themselves. Pipeline developers, technical directors, production R&D and infrastructure people from more than 50 studios across 40-plus countries. Online, the hallway track lives on our Discord, and the speakers stay on after their talks.
Join the Discord
A programme of talks on the work studios are doing right now: AI-assisted production, agentic workflows, OpenUSD implementation, cloud adoption, render farm modernization, real-time graphics and production storage. Active projects with real budgets and real deadlines, including the parts that broke.
See the schedule
The tenth Pipeline Awards close out the year in December. Nominations are closed and our independent panel has made its decisions, across two categories: Pipeline Project of the Year and Pipeline Hero of the Year — the tools that save studios months of work, and the people who build them.
About the awards