Asset Tracking & Organization

sinistergfx

I'm wondering about what kinds of asset management systems people have used and would recommend.

It would have to work over the net for remote access. Free is good, too.

Currently we're planning on using Subversion along with the TortoiseSVN client (we're already using it for code). It seems like it should work out fine, but It'd be nice if there was another layer on top that provided previews and kept associations to other files (like linking concept art or textures) and maybe had other sorts of meta data.

I'm going to keep researching, but hopefully someone else has dealt with this before.

animatr

SVN is great. P4 isnt bad....but SVN is just as good

EarthQuake

SVN works alright, probablly your best bet for cheap. If you can actually shell out some money go with alienbrain, its leaps and bounds better for art.

Neox

we're using perforce

MoP

Subversion and TortoiseSVN is a good choice, I'd say.

I like how you don't actually have to have a separate app open like you do with AlienBrain and Perforce, SVN just incorporates into Windows Explorer. Less open windows to worry about.

Neox

Perforce does the same, you can handle or your files within the explorer and if the right plugins used, also directly in Max, i only open P4Win when i have to get one file that i currently don't have on my computer, if i have to sync a folder i can do this in the explorer.
But i also use p4win when i have to check in more then one file from several folders, it's way easier to do it there then to have to go through als the folders and check in the files seperately.

Snowfly

SVN/Tortoise is what we're using too. Don't know if there's a way to smartly associate files, but naming conventions and a good folder structure takes care of that easily. It doesn't handle large files very well though, a lot of junk is created and you may run into disk space problems. That's the main reason we are moving the project over to alienbrain.

danr

yeah, svn isn't a fan of big files at all, working with loads of max files and textures can be a real pain. Just exploring your directories can take a while if they're loaded (though you can turn all the svn gubbins off for exploring purposes, there's also a script you can drop into each folder that does the same)

CheapAlert

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SVN works alright, probablly your best bet for cheap.

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Damn right it is the best bet for me. Been using an SVN repository for months now, works great

it's not slow for big files for me. Maybe it's your server?

Thumbs.db files getting into the repository is annoying, though

sinistergfx

You can set up an ignore for those. On the other hand, people should be watching what they're commiting.

sinistergfx

No, that's totally fine.

That's the next logical step, and something that I'm trying to refine also.

Joshua Stubbles

Perforce is terrible for art asset handling, imo.
You can't see any image thumbnails, which is a HUGE pain. And it's got loads of other flaws.
I like Alienbrain, personally. Although I know it's not quite as secure as Perforce is.

Daz

We actually had to ditch Alienbrain on a project I was on before. I liked the UI, but it completely choked to an unusable crawl on a big project with many end users.

Perforce clearly isn't designed with Art asset use in mind. The terminoligies irk me. Clobber? Sync to head revision?! But its solid and it works so that's what were using.

malcolm

AlienBrain can go fuck it's self, slowest unreliable piece of shit out there, almost as bad as microsoft source safe. Perforce for the win, although if you are unorganized and like dragging random files from who knows where and hope they get to the right folder you will fail using perforce.

Joshua Stubbles

I just don't like the terminology or functionality of Perforce. I mean come on, no thumbnail view?
As Daz states, it's clearly not for artists.

I'm not sure what everyone's beef with Alienbrain is though. I've found that if it's on a good sever, it's the most stable thing out there. I've had more issues with PerForce, Starteam and Source Safe than I have with Alienbrain.

SouL

What version of perforce are you using?

We use p4 at work and there's a previewer for images. The right pane can be customzied to list whatever you want (files in the listed directory, image previes, and a host of other bs).

I do 2 things in p4 (okay, well 3). Check shit out. Then check shit back in. And write stupid comments about what changes I've just done. Mexican delicacies such as Tacos and Burritos are usually used to describe my file changes.

motives

where do you customize that? i been digging around trying to find it without luck.

sinistergfx

So far, SVN + Tortoise is working out nicely.

Since it's integrated into explorer, there's not much learning to do and you get thumbnails for the filetypes you have support for. (this is useful: http://www.seriema.net/thumbview/)

The speed seems good at this point. There are supposed to be some speed & large file handling improvements as of SVN 1.4 which was released in September.

Whargoul

I'm with Malcolm. Alienbrain is pure shit. Great for producers who want to check out thumbnails of your textures and bitch about stuff they don't know.

Perforce is fast and stable, does what I want (check in, check out, version control). I only wish it allowed you to make empty directory structures for the beginning of projects!

adam

My vote's on Perforce. My experience with SVN is that it's limited in how many files it can handle at any given moment. I haven't had a single hitch with Perforce. Perforce is also integrated in to Explorer. If you've got the bandwidth with tools programmers look in to integrating Perforce in to Photoshop and your 3D apps.

Also, I can recommend JIRA for actual task tracking. You input a task, put in the estimated amount of time you think it'll take to complete the task, then log your work (in hours, days, weeks) and it'll calculate how many hours are left for the task - and how many are left for the overall project. You also assign tasks based on user names etc. etc.

We use it at work, works great.

JIRA link: http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/

thomasp

alienbrain - uaaarrgh. c-r-a-p. get's my thumbs down as well.

integration of these systems into 2D/3D apps is something i have only had bad experience with as well - the constant nagging led to a situation where half the art team at a former place was working outside the system, manually checking in/out at the end of they day - because no one could stand dealing with all those pop-up messages anymore. plus, photoshop ran far more stable without the stupid alienbrain plugin.

we're using custom asset management software - and a small freeware util called "todolist" http://www.codeproject.com/tools/ToDoList2.asp

sinistergfx

The cool thing about TortoiseSVN's integration into explorer is that you can update & commit revisions inside the file dialog of whatever software you're using.

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My experience with SVN is that it's limited in how many files it can handle at any given moment.

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This is false AFAIK. Plenty of large projects use SVN (Quake Wars included).

adam

You can do the same with Perforce. Right click the file - in anyway window, not just Explorer, and check it out, check it in, etc. etc.

I believe SVN is slower in checking-in and out files. An example is the source code for an engine we're currently using takes about 2 hours to check out on SVN - but about 10 minutes on Perforce.

Rick Stirling

Alienbrain seems to be getting worse - slower and buggier and much more a resource hog.

What has it got going for it? After thinking for a while I could only come up with: pretty much everyone who's worked in the games industry has used it, so they can hit the ground running.

sinistergfx

That's pretty ridiculous; you guys must have been doing something wrong.

Here's some benchmarks TTimo over at id Software did with some -old- versions of SVN & TortoiseSVN http://zerowing.idsoftware.com/yam/Subversion_-_tests.

Summary: checking 2.4GB of files out of a 28GB repository takes 14 minutes.

Performance & large file handling have been improved since then.


Rick: Yeah, there's a lot of things people cling to just because they're used to them.

parasyte7

This is actually a pretty cool tool and seems to work pretty well. The pro version is coming out soon with many more features.

http://www.garagegames.com/mg/snapshot/view.php?qid=1301

doc rob

I used TortoiseSVN on Imperator for the character team. Once the repository got huge, browsing the folders became really slow. That was problematic for end users just trying to work on their local files (while the client is constantly querying the server). But otherwise it was really solid.

I haven't tried it, but have you looked into Autodesk's Vault? It comes with Max iirc.

sinistergfx

Haven't checked out Vault lately. I'll have to look into if it can work as a standalone asset manager; but I'd like the stay away from solutions that are tied to specific [expensive] software.

Right now, we're using SVN for fairly small stuff; but we may end up re-evaluating as we move onto bigger things. Theoretically, they won't be as gigantic as Imperator . I'm going to try doing some tests in the new version with large repositories.

Thanks for the suggestions on project management software, keep those coming .

edit:
doc_rob: do you remember if you were using the BDB or FSFS filesystem?

Eric Chadwick

To setup empty directories at the start of a project, I commit placeholder.txt files in them, then remove them when content starts appearing.

SouL

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where do you customize that? i been digging around trying to find it without luck.

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There should be tabs you're able to click on... Files, Pending, Submitted, and History.

Files will list the files in the directory you're in. Whithin the Files tab, you can look at the selected file's information, who has it checked out, and a preview of the image. At the moment, previews are only displayed for .TGAs or other small image files. There must be some file size setting that's disabling the previewing of raw PSD assets.

sinistergfx

I did some testing yesterday with version 1.4 of SVN and Tortoise SVN.

The repository was 1.8GB with various types of files, max scenes, textures, text files. There were about 850 files which ranged from a few K to 300MB.
Checking out of the repository took about 3 mins (you only need to do the check out once, when you first join the repository).

Updating from the repository was very quick, updates were able to be checked within seconds. The transferring of the updates was as quick as you'd expect copying a file over to be. Commiting changes was the same.

Browsing folders was as fast a browsing any normal folder and I didn't experience any constant access or thrashing.

So it seems that whatever performance problems there used to be, have been fixed; at least in the 1.4 versions released in September.

I plan on doing some more tests with even bigger repositories with a greater file count.

firestarter

If there`s a choice.. Alienbrain followed by Perforce, Tortoise SVN sucked so much it was unusable, then again I can`t attest to it having been set up correctly.

hawken

any of these work on the mac and linux? would be good to know the best cross platform solution.

sinistergfx

Alienbrain, Perforce, & SVN are cross platform.