How do you manage your Brushes/Tools/.. in a studio environment?
greentooth
A quick question for you fine people working in a studio environment, or those of you who work very organized 
:
“How do you manage/distribute your brushes/plugins/tools/… inhouse?”
Let me elaborate.
In the (small) studio I am currently working at, we (used to) distribute art resources usually just by copying them from the server.
Person A creates a cool Photoshop brush, copies it onto the server, writes a message in the company-art-chat and then everybody can go to the server where he/she can copy the new brush from.
Not super slick, more like lanparty 2003... but it worked sofar.
Things started to get a bit more complicated when I wanted to improve the photoshop pipeline by using some scripts & actions.
Now people needed to update said resources more often. This was a bit frustrating, especially when people forgot to copy the newest version and got stuck at some point.
I then read about mklink (symbolic links in windows). This was a HUGE help!
Now I could add my scripts/actions to perforce and link the perforce folder to the photoshop directory. This way I can update the scripts and even have version control and people don’t need to bother updating anymore.
The mklink-setup can even be saved in a .bat file so it’s really easy to set up. The only problem is, that you need to do this for every folder which can be a bit tedious, when not everyone’s installations paths are the same ._. ...
A prime example for “awesome studio environment software” are the allegorithmic products.
I can target multiple directories (local/server/even my personal cloud ) to draw resources from. No need to find work around, it’s all built in. Kudos for this awesome piece of software!
Now to may actual question:
Do you know cool tools/handy tricks (like the symbolic link), that could help improve the distribution of art resource. I would especially be interested in finding a way, to feed one folder with the content of multiple other folders (e.g. brushes from multiple locations).
This thread should not be so much about me though, but more about how YOU mange stuff like this.
:“How do you manage/distribute your brushes/plugins/tools/… inhouse?”
Let me elaborate.
In the (small) studio I am currently working at, we (used to) distribute art resources usually just by copying them from the server.
Person A creates a cool Photoshop brush, copies it onto the server, writes a message in the company-art-chat and then everybody can go to the server where he/she can copy the new brush from.
Not super slick, more like lanparty 2003... but it worked sofar.
Things started to get a bit more complicated when I wanted to improve the photoshop pipeline by using some scripts & actions.
Now people needed to update said resources more often. This was a bit frustrating, especially when people forgot to copy the newest version and got stuck at some point.
I then read about mklink (symbolic links in windows). This was a HUGE help!
Now I could add my scripts/actions to perforce and link the perforce folder to the photoshop directory. This way I can update the scripts and even have version control and people don’t need to bother updating anymore.
The mklink-setup can even be saved in a .bat file so it’s really easy to set up. The only problem is, that you need to do this for every folder which can be a bit tedious, when not everyone’s installations paths are the same ._. ...
A prime example for “awesome studio environment software” are the allegorithmic products.
I can target multiple directories (local/server/even my personal cloud ) to draw resources from. No need to find work around, it’s all built in. Kudos for this awesome piece of software!
Now to may actual question:
Do you know cool tools/handy tricks (like the symbolic link), that could help improve the distribution of art resource. I would especially be interested in finding a way, to feed one folder with the content of multiple other folders (e.g. brushes from multiple locations).
This thread should not be so much about me though, but more about how YOU mange stuff like this
.
Replies
We don't share brushes. We're spending more and more time in Substance, and I'm trying to get the concept arts on Clip Studio Paint. But for our Photoshop scripts they are just in Perforce, and we set hotkeys for actions that run the scripts we need.
For 3ds Max and Maya we point the user scripts and plug folders to Perforce. If your interested in more details, I can cough them up, but it's a lot to document.
Unfortunately this is a more universal problem and the brushes were only an example for this. I actually am looking for a more universal solution.
Well, if you have any documentation that you could share. That would be super cool.
We only have very dated documentation and I would like to update/restructure things a bit. So some examples of best practices would be much appreciated.
On a diffrent note: Are you, from and artist point of view, happy using Perforce as versioning tool? Have you tried others?
They can also run this to sync at any time so if its immediate its a 1-click solution.
We have something similar at work, not for the art department yet though.
This also seems to be the most flexible option sofar. Especially when dealing with stubborn tools like Zbrush
So we get latest data from p4 when we get in in the morning, and every time we launch photoshop it actually runs another thing that installs all of your scripts and whatnot, then launches photoshop for you.
Radical
For people intressted in that topic as well, read about robocopy. It is super easy to set up and pretty powerful.
That's interesting... do you notice the programs taking longer to startup because of this?
https://cubebrush.co/kritskiy/products/mvl1g-7tXR
Downside for this is that you can't give a .bat an Icon, as far as I know. So I endet up creating a shortcut to the .bat file, which then I was able to give the Zbrush Icon back