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. Both half-days are free — see the full run of show, or subscribe to our newsletter and you will get the registration links first.
Half-day one
AI and agentic workflows in digital media pipelines
Three talks converging on one argument: generative AI only behaves once the pipeline is holding the reins. Why control cannot live in the prompt; what governance and rights management look like inside a working studio pipeline; and what changes when agents run inside standard 3D software rather than alongside it.
Half-day two
Pipeline engineering and operations at production scale
The three layers everything else in a studio sits on: the format, the storage, the automation. Getting to OpenUSD without stalling halfway; taking I/O out of the critical path for rendering, playback and cloud bursting; and handing tedious QC checks to agents on the artist's own workstation, with no proprietary data leaving the building.
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