Asset tracking and version control for a small art-side team

Mehran Khan

Hi,
I am looking for an app to help me keep track of the assets that we make on  the art side of our development team.
The art time is really small (3-5 people) so the assets are not a whole lot but we are getting to the point where it's getting hard for us to keep track of everything.
Since we are an indie team a free solution (even with a file size cap) would work.
thank you,

fatihG_

Trello and Bitbucket?

Trello is free, though you can upgrade for more features last time i checked.
Bitbucket seems to be perfect for your teamsize and it is free for up to 5 people. 

Appearantly Trello is integrated into Bitbucket as well.

That being said I never used Bitbucket.

Mehran Khan

thanks faithG_ , what about version control for asset files. Can you suggest something for version control of assets like DCC tool files (max, ps)?

kio

bitbucket does the version control with git in his proposal. But I think its pretty limited sizewise - at least the free version.

That said, im not sure if git is really the best solution for you, your programmes will probably love it, but I fear your regular artists might be a bit overwhelmed by it.

the real question is more - do you need versioning on a commit base or is file-based good enough? this will lead you either to cloud storage or a more sophisticated vcs. So googledrive/dropbox might work fine for you, but youll be unable to branch, go back in history etc.

For VCS I think svn, git (probably with LFS), perforce etc. should all do what you want, but its a bit up to you what you can afford, and how flexible(or complex..) you want your system.

McDev

SVN or Git by default are a bad solution usually for those kind of things ,especially if you make changes to art assets regularly. If I am not mistaken Bitbucket is storing each change as a seperate copy which increases your repo size rapidly. Given the 2GB limit for the free edition  this is an issue.

As mentioned you can look int other solutions like Perforce or Git LFS (which works with Bitbucket as well).

But I would recommend a simple file structure like your own server or Dropbox, GoogleDrive and the like. The reason is simple, if you use a verison controll system like Git you have to update all the content and I wonder why would you do that?

Mostly artists only need a bunch of files, copy them to their machines, make their changes and send them back to the server.
Also from experience artists are bad at Git and SVN conflict handling and tend to break stuff, no offence

It is also good to use ProjectManagement software like Trello, Jira or so. This displays who is working at what to reduce conflicts and to make sure that anything is up to date.

kio

Regarding SVN and binary files, we're using it heavly in the studio and have really no problems with it. It handles large files quite well, and using it is not overly complicated - but yes artists are bad at conflict handling. Most of the time its not really an issue, as people are not really working on the same stuff anyways.

fatihG_

Im not too experienced with all of this, but have used SVN as an artist plenty of times. 
The comments about conflicts is definitely true, however the most issues I had with VC personally was when i just started using it in general. 
When I worked with remote artists and VC, it took more time than I'd like to admit to get them to use it efficiently.

Anyway you can try looking into a nasbox as well. This will require you to spend some money on one of them, but you will basically have your own server you can use VC with.
There is also FreeNas. If you have a spare computer lying around, with sufficient storage, you could get it to run Freenas. 

Mehran Khan

AH yes , setting up NAS is something that I am looking into as well. Thanks guys for the help. I will look up this stuff and hopefully the solution should be in there somewhere.
But yes the biggest problem is with extremely large file sizes and what I primarily want is to have version control and Tracking version-ed files next to specific tasks.

HAWK12HT

Perforce is what is coming up as artist friendly vc although I still have to test it myself, I am sure someone who have used it may be able to share more info about this particular vc. 

Axi5

Yeah I like perforce, I sent the devs some feedback when they asked for it a little while ago and they e-invited me to a Perforce for Game Devs webinar:

https://www.perforce.com/webinars/game-development-best-practices

It's also free for small teams and integrates well with Git so you can use that workflow too.

I use SVN in my day to day at work so I haven't got loads of experience with Perforce but I remember their binary diff tool was excellent and I'm also pretty sure you can do local commits ala Git style which is very handy when you want to keep a backup of your changes but not push the whole lot of WIP to the depot.

Mehran Khan

I am actually looking into having a git-based local repo setup on a netgear NAS. So the artside will be on it's own branch that will never be sent to the cloud accept for only the stuff which we want deployed/tested.
The benefits of this is homogeneity with the dev-team.

Eric Chadwick

Should be fine, as long as you're remote-backing up that NAS. Flood, fire, theft, chickens, etc.

monster

Personally, I'd go with perforce for an art depot to be used by artists.

• It's free for 5 users.
• File locking. < Probably the most important feature for artists. Git has a file locking plugin. But there is no UI for it, in practice no one remembers to lock files, and the file are not read only by default.
• They give super fast support, even for free users. We've switched to paid 20 users, but when we used the free version they would respond to emails within an hour, and solved every single issue we had.
• You don't need to have the full depot on your working pc. git will always download every file and all history for every file. This can eat a lot of disk space. With perforce you can even download just a single file you need to work with.
• Perforce has parallel download and upload (it's off by ) and it makes getting and submitting lots of files way faster even on a local network server like we.
• Finally, I've never had to google problems/solution for version control system more in my life than for git. I guess you could say it's not intuitive.

Mehran Khan

monster said:

Personally, I'd go with perforce for an art depot to be used by artists.

• It's free for 5 users.
• File locking. < Probably the most important feature for artists. Git has a file locking plugin. But there is no UI for it, in practice no one remembers to lock files, and the file are not read only by default.
• They give super fast support, even for free users. We've switched to paid 20 users, but when we used the free version they would respond to emails within an hour, and solved every single issue we had.
• You don't need to have the full depot on your working pc. git will always download every file and all history for every file. This can eat a lot of disk space. With perforce you can even download just a single file you need to work with.
• Perforce has parallel download and upload (it's off by ) and it makes getting and submitting lots of files way faster even on a local network server like we.
• Finally, I've never had to google problems/solution for version control system more in my life than for git. I guess you could say it's not intuitive.

you are very much correct about git being counter-intuitive. I will look into perforce now that most people are saying good things about it. and we are just 4 people right now in the art team and maybe even scale up to more people.