Block 3, first part: tools and pipelines.
Writing about pipelines this week forced me to articulate things I'd been doing on instinct. That's uncomfortable in a useful way. When you have to explain why you structure something a certain way, you quickly find out whether you actually have a reason or whether you've just been doing it out of habit.
I'm still working out what makes my approach to pipelines distinctly mine. Part of it comes down to how I weigh speed against quality: they're not always at odds, but when they are, which one gives first? That's not a question I had a clean answer to before this week. I'm not sure I have a clean answer now either, but I at least know it's a question worth being deliberate about.
The reflection on past decisions was probably the most useful part. Looking back at choices I made on previous projects and tracing why they played out the way they did is more grounding than any amount of forward planning. It's also humbling. There are a few things I'd clearly do differently. Noting that down matters.
One thing I want to keep pushing on is involving external input earlier. I have my own intuitions about what a pipeline needs, but those intuitions are shaped by my own context. End-users think differently. Knowing why something doesn't land for them is often more valuable than knowing why it does land for me.
What clicked
Thinking out loud about pipeline design, on the blog and in the posts, helped me surface assumptions I didn't know I was making. The "How I Structure a Pipeline" and "Documenting Tools for Others" posts in particular felt like they were doing real work: not just explaining a process, but actually refining how I think about it.
What flopped
No images. The NDA makes it impossible to show actual documentation examples or real pipeline screenshots from recent work, and most companies don't publish that kind of material either. It's kept close. So a lot of the posts this week were more abstract than I wanted them to be. I could describe the approach, but I couldn't show it. That's a meaningful limitation for this type of content.
Into next week
Block 3's second part shifts toward the more technical side of pipelines: LOD systems, texel density, mesh instancing, texture compression. More math, more numbers to justify the decisions. Looking forward to it.
© 2026 Stefan Groenewoud. All views are my own, not those of my employer.