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Texture management

Chubbydan
polycounter lvl 13
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Chubbydan polycounter lvl 13
hello everyone,

I'm currently working with a new team and we're trying to organise ourselves a bit better and as such we've all got our own texture libraries that we use but it would be really useful to combine all these together into one stored location which I'm sure you can imagine will take time.

What I'm asking you lovely polycounters is that does anyone know of a piece of software that could help out?

Some examples of what I'm looking for are;

http://www.extensis.com/en/digital-asset-management/portfolio-server-10/index.jsp?ref=nav

http://www.picajet.com/en/index.php?page=features#Digital_Photo_Management_Software

http://picasa.google.com/features.html

Extensis is a bit pricey but seems like the dogs, picajet seems more affordable and I'm currently installing the free trial and picasa seems nice and free but space would be limited.

Any help appreciated as ever, cheers!

Replies

  • Chubbydan
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    Chubbydan polycounter lvl 13
    I've just been advised about adobe bridge? Anyone got any reviews on it?
  • Chubbydan
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    Chubbydan polycounter lvl 13
    Seems like bridge is pretty ace for the job but just trying to figure out how to share keyword sets across the network.
  • leechdemon
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    leechdemon polycounter lvl 11
    Not a huge fan of any of those... for our management I just store the images in a series of named folders that sit on our network. That's worked pretty well for me, although to be fair, I'm the only one using it.

    You might try saving the tags in the images' Metadata. I'd imagine Bridge can tap into that fairly easily.
  • Mark Dygert
    Our IT guy is some kind of mad scientist genius that suggested a way to create a single network folder from a group of other folders. Basically everyone would agree to a folder structure like leechdemon suggested and then through some kind of dark IT magic he would share them out in a way that they appear as one folder on the network.
    Accessing it locally would only give access to your files.
    Accessing it through the network would show everyone's files.
    Adding or removing files locally would add them to the network.
    Removing files from the network would remove them wherever they where stored locally, which is why I think we didn't go for it, we wanted a little more protection and back up.

    We never tried it out and I'm not really sure I'm describing it accurately but you might want to hunt around the intertubes to see if you can find it, most of that IT junk is somewhere on teh webs. It might of been a win7 only feature...
  • Toast
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    Toast polycounter lvl 11
    I tag, windows 7 is excellent at combining tags and works like Google with + and -....if you enable indexing on the server it can be fast. You can also drag + drop into the hypershade and sure you can do this in max as well.

    I'm over physical folders (well I keep a basic structure), but this will probably be very messy in a network situation, but not if you all agree on a tagging structure, I reckon it would hold up quite well as its definitley faster to find things. Logically storing things though is obviously off the wall.

    I wonder if you could write a script in a 3d program to type in a tag.

    "Metal" "rusted" press enter and bam, opens a new window and searches image tags in a predefined base library. Whereby you find the one you are after in the search results and drag it back into Maya.

    Hmmm...Sounds like a challenge.
  • leechdemon
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    leechdemon polycounter lvl 11
    Our IT guy is some kind of mad scientist genius that suggested a way to create a single network folder from a group of other folders. Basically everyone would agree to a folder structure like leechdemon suggested and then through some kind of dark IT magic he would share them out in a way that they appear as one folder on the network.
    Accessing it locally would only give access to your files.
    Accessing it through the network would show everyone's files.
    Adding or removing files locally would add them to the network.
    Removing files from the network would remove them wherever they where stored locally, which is why I think we didn't go for it, we wanted a little more protection and back up.

    Is that like Mercurial or Git or something? We use that here, and it's fairly neat... it HATES psd's though, since it records any change, and layered PSD's can get to be quite huge. I hear Git handles this better, but we haven't tried it yet.
    Toast wrote: »
    I'm over physical folders (well I keep a basic structure), but this will probably be very messy in a network situation, but not if you all agree on a tagging structure, I reckon it would hold up quite well as its definitley faster to find things. Logically storing things though is obviously off the wall.

    I think the fact that I'm the only one using my physical folder system is the only reason it's working, to be honest. Regardless, even with tags, some sort of unified tagging system is important, otherwise you're tagging things "Dirt" while your coworker is tagging them "Grit" or something.

    I wonder if you could use Firefox Bookmarks (or Delicious, etc) to tag files in local directories. Maybe you make a shared account or something, and dump some directory html files into each to aid in navigation, but then you'd rely on FF/Delicious's built-in tagging system to do the work for you.
  • r_fletch_r
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    r_fletch_r polycounter lvl 9
    At work we map a network drive to the textures folder. Everyone uses the same drive letter and it works without a hitch. some of us use bridge and some just use explorer. the work volumes are on a nightly backup so if someone messes up its easy to revert.
  • renderhjs
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    renderhjs sublime tool
    I guess it could be worthy writing a server app for a company infrastructure that scans all resources on a daily night base update thumbnails etc. and provide a interface like Google image search with some unique filter options like tags.

    What apps like bridge and acdsee or alike do is nothing that can't be done with this but having a centralized spot (server software) has the advantage of a clean and updated structure on a regular basis.
    Some studios even write their own material and asset browsing tools for web- browsers so everyone can search, tag and grab files. In our company we use a swiki to share and index resources (logins, important info on tech stuff, project references,... ) it just makes things a lot easier instead of having that stuff float around on network drives.
  • Chubbydan
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    Chubbydan polycounter lvl 13
    Hi everyone,

    Cheers for the replies, Spending a wee bit more time on it and come up with the following workflow.

    Using bridge you can import export a shared keywords list which means that with a massive texture collection you can break down your keywords for specific projects but still have a general tag set too. Handy I'm sure you'll agreeeee. The metadata contained in the exif for each image is editable in notepad, windows browser or bridge but seemingly for png's and gifs' it is bridge only or so we've found so far.

    Bridge also allows for keyword/tag searching in a nice friendly way so great for time saving.

    ( I feel like I should be on the payroll for adobe here, comission welcome if anyone from adobe reading this )

    The hitch we have with the above is that if multiple people are wanting to edit the keywords we need a merge process or a check in/out system. One of the programmers here is working on a merge process so we can all work locally and just merge at the end of the day or hourly or whatever.
    Someone in the office has mentioned adobe drive??? Never used or know anyone who has used.


    Hope some folk found this useful :)

    cheers
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