Alchemy — Animation Infrastructure OS¶

Alchemy is a production automation system for the animation and VFX industry. It treats filmmaking as manufacturing: every creative task has defined phases, inputs, outputs, and automation hooks. Alchemy is the infrastructure layer that connects them.

Film production is manufacturing. Every department is a station on the line. Every asset is a work order. Every publish is a quality gate.

Alchemy inserts automation at the moments that matter to artists — not as a pipeline imposed from above, but as a cookbook of recipes triggered at natural creative inflection points. The goal is to give individual artists and small studios the pipeline infrastructure of a major studio.

The system in one diagram¶

flowchart LR
    subgraph alc [alc — core library]
        PathObject --> MSD[".msd state files"]
        MSD --> Cookbook["Cookbook recipes"]
        Cookbook --> Plugins["Software plugins<br/>Maya · Blender · Unreal · Premiere · ..."]
    end
    subgraph app [app — studio dashboard]
        Routes["FastAPI + HTMX routes"] --> Tools["Script reader · Timeline ·<br/>Cookbook IDE · Render monitor"]
    end
    alc <--> app

Where to start¶

You want to...	Read
Run the app locally	Getting Started
Understand the big picture	Architecture Overview
Understand production addressing	PathObject
Understand the automation engine	Cookbook
Add support for a new software	Plugins
Browse the code-level API	API Reference

Key concepts at a glance¶

Concept	Description
`PathObject`	Universal production address — every file has one
`.msd` file	JSON state file for any production entity (Magic Scene Description)
`TaskManifest`	Manufacturing state of one task for one asset
`VersionManifest`	State of one version of one task
`Recipe`	Automation definition for a (software × task × phase)
`RecipeStep`	Atomic automation unit — the agent contract
`Cookbook`	The full library of recipes for a studio
`POM`	Active PathObject — where the artist is right now
`MSD_SERVICE`	Project-level task state aggregator
`PROJECT_REGISTRY`	Asset registry (characters, props, envs, scenes)