Art Asset Management feels broken, so I built a tool to fix it.
Hi, I’m Pierre. I built a tool for indies to store, version, sync, and organize art assets in the cloud.
As an indie, it was hard for me to organize and version art assets before they were ready for the game engine.
I was forced to use complicated folder hierarchies and naming conventions in an attempt to keep my assets organized. Every single time I updated an asset I would make a change to the file name mario_1.1 —> mario_1.2.
All of this annoyed me, so I built a tool to solve this problem. Would anyone be willing to try my tool out and provide feedback?
Here’s an early product demo.
You can sign-up here and I’ll get you an invite link.
Feel free to comment, dm me, or hit me up on discord, or twitter. I can send you an invite link that way instead if you prefer! :)
Replies
what does your solution offer, that others (even free ones, svn, git) don't?
Excellent question from Neox!
Some additional feedback;
1. Since its the most recent outage I know of, even Microsofts services can be offline.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64397643
2. I might have signed NDAs. Can´t upload to your server or servers you are renting.
3. I need an offline solution and a self hosted solution.
a plain simple offline solution, Desktop installations on Windows, Linux, Mac.
which means I need it to function without much to set up.
Portable versions preferred.
4. If it is ever going to be for a NAS/Personal Server, make its installation process easy and document it. Keep the Document fresh and current.
Support for Personal Servers like Ubuntu Server and ways of using a Docker installation
5. Perpetual licensing! After all we are handling valuable data(mine or that of my clients) here.
6. Is there encryption?
Hey, thanks for the responses!
Great questionsNeox! Our solution is aimed primarily at a non technical audience. Many of the artists I've spoken with have trouble with Git and SVN for version control. So instead they use Google Drive (which has it own set of issues).
The idea is to allow non-technical folks to get started quickly (like Google Drive), but still have version control, tagging, and file syncing. I'll also add that this tool has an API. So devs can pull assets directly from our tool into the source control they're using for their game project (git, SVN, perforce, etc.)
Important questions myclay! We haven't built out support fo an offline or self hosted solution, but it's something we'd like to support in the near term.
I'd be curious to know, how do you all typically store assets before they're ready to be implemented in the game engine?
We currently use PlasticSCM in Gluon mode for our Asset server, which comes with a few advantages like being able to download single assets or folders, file locking etc. Previously I've used both SVN (ancient as it is) and Git for art assets, and I think neither works very well.
Honestly, much more than version tracking, I'd want a decent tool that hooks into an established setup, and gives you review tools. There are a few out there, but none so far have been right for our small team, either because of price or workflow issues.
Perforce is free for groups of less than 5 users. I've used perforce at every company I've worked for since 2003. It's what I'd think of as the established workflow.
PlasticSCM seems pretty cool though.
Perforce is hands down the best currently available version control for art resources - for code I'm not really up to speed enough with Git to say which is better - I know SVN is a shitshow for everything though because I've been forced to use it for the last 5 years.
p4 and git can both be cloud or local and have extensive ecosystems around them for integration into DCCs via python/whatever (so artists never have to touch the actual version control system)
the killer asset management application will be the one that can hook into whichever version control system a studio/team is using and add a usable visualisation and feedback front-end onto it - im not sure I see a real need for anything that reinvents version control
Add one more person to that team, and you're now paying through the nose :D
Perforce seems nice, but the cost turned us off of it.
As Poopipe says: version control already exists, try to add something on top of that that makes versioning and reviewing visual and fast. Tie project and task management into it. A few are already trying to do that: Anchorpoint, Snowtrack, ftrack, reviewstudio, gitstudio, Mudstack... I've only used a few of these, but it seems promising.
We're currently using Notion for project management, knowledge base and bugtracking, but if there was something that tied into our version control we'd probably seriously consider that instead!
Really interesting discussion here, and I'd totally agree. We have a feature (currently in alpha), that supports Multiplayer Blender.
A user can click on an blender compatible asset in the platform, and it launches a blender session within the browser. Multiple users can join this same session to collaborate together. Some use cases that folks have said are helpful here:
-Being able to compare notes live for any art direction-related issues, things like silhouette, and detail placement for the texture when mapped to the model.
-Reviewing errors, especially geometry normal errors where they really stand out as you pan around. Even cracks in the mesh are so much easier to see when the model is moving, and with multiple people looking at the same thing you're way more likely to catch issues.
-In real-time,you can follow' someone else's camera view, kind of like a presentation mode but maybe you can hop in and out of their view at will. Kind of like a super-powered screen share, with way higher fidelity and way less lag/pixelation, etc.
-the ability to place markers with attached comments, placing viewpoints so that everyone can see the same angle and area.
Here's a demo if you're curious: https://youtu.be/DFydaaW-e8I
Would this solve existing pain points for collaboration and review (at least for artists who use Blender) ?
in situations where you can effectively review an asset outside of the target engine yes
eg. I can see this being particularly beneficial when reviewing fairly generic outsourced prop content since most of your time is spent telling them they made crap UVs or have too much geometry. The last project i worked on we had <>5000 of these so a few minutes saved on each feedback cycle really adds up - its a bit of a shame there's not an equivalent for software that studios actually use
Yes that can solve some painpoints.
That Collab feature reminds me of Ubisoft Mixer (not updated anymore)
Pros of Ubisofts Animation Studio approach;
It works locally, directly within the program.
no browser shenanigans and thus it was fast.
Works in the local network and if needed over the net.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N-XPnvF74Y
Ubisoft Mixer also allowed working together within the scene at the same time.
I'm actually building this tool with the intention of game studios actually using it. What do you think the biggest blockers are for a studio in experimenting with this tool?
Ah yes, I've seen that add on!
"no browser shenanigans and thus it was fast."
Are the concerns with a browser based tool that it would have poor latency?
There's a couple of issues.
1: no studio is going to be happy hosting their data somewhere they don't have full control. AWS or Azure is usually okay for outsourced content once you shout at legal for long enough but even that's a hard sell.
2: studios aren't interested in adopting anything that can't be plugged into their existing pipeline with trivial effort.
Eg. The blender thing is nice but if you're not using blender as your pipeline backbone (which almost nobody is) it's immediately no use. There's no 'just add blender to your pipeline' scenario either - we're all sitting on 15 years of legacy pipeline code that expects everyone to be using Maya.
Fwiw I think a browser based app that allowed you to view a mesh with textures/UVs/wireframe directly from an interface into your source control repo would be pretty popular. It'd want support for fbx (and USD) at least - and I'd expect a way to write your own importer would be beneficial (plenty of studios are still using custom formats)
Even if you are using Blender as your main pipeline software (which we are), it's not interesting to have it run in the browser.
I'm still going to want to run my own copy locally, which works without internet access, has no connection hickups, will work even when your inevitable subscription runs out...
If, as Poopipe says, we could browse our (already online) repo easily, review assets together and leave feedback... sure. But it'd have to be a pretty complete and robust package!
Really helpful feedback here all! I want to quickly summarize what I'm hearing, and then suggest the solution I'd like to build. I'd love your feedback (if you'd indulge me a little bit longer :) )
Summary of pain: Reviewing assets together as a team and leaving in-context feedback on assets is a pain point. Quickly seeing the visual history of an asset or previous iterations of an asset is also painful. No studio in their right mind would be willing to move their existing repos to a different version control product.
Potential Solution: What if Yonder (my product) sat on top of your existing asset repositories (Perforce/Plastic/etc.). It then allowed you to view these assets
using Blender as the asset viewer. If you're using Maya in your pipeline, it would quickly convert these assets to a Blender compatible format (within Yonder)
when users wanted to view that asset on Yonder. Multiple people could view the asset at once in multiplayer mode. Users could leave feedback directly on the
asset (e.g. a user could highlight part of the asset in Blender and leave a text comment). All of this would take place in the browser or in the form of a desktop
app (tbd).
Would this solution solve an existing pain point your studios are facing? Bonus question, are there other studios that are encountering this pain point?
solve is a very strong word :p
Assuming it behaves pretty seamlessly then this would be useful when reviewing assets for technical quality/requirements etc. Very handy for outsource management etc.
I assume the end user (the feedback giver) doesn't require a blender install?
Would your tool work with something like TrueNAS? As I'm sure many artists will attest, local storage is hard to come by.
I would be happy if we could just have a working hierarchical tag/keyword system in Windows and thumbnail preview for both image and 3d files. Tried to find something convenient for years then just gave up. It would never happen . Not in my lifetime my guess.
So far I use imatch from phootools.com . it's a closest thing but too much photography only oriented while still allows to add and tags/keywords any sort of files.
An ideal DAM would be AI assisted imo but from what I tried so far they don't do anything useful beyond recognizing faces and cats in pictures.