Version control system for artists

sir-knight

Hey guys, what does everyone use in their office for version controlling of art assets, I'm pushing our library/engineering teams to try and work some sort of workflow integration where we can version control and preview our art assets (mainly psd and png files). We currently use svn and tortoise svn in the office, but they don't offer thumbnail difference viewing and is more code oriented, so I'm trying to find some options (hopefully free) that we can look into here as the company grows.

ohnein

I'm not completely sure but I remember seeing image/file preview in Alien Brain. I'm not sure if Preforce supports this.

danr

you can scribble swearwords and cocks on top of the preview in Alienbrain, which is a nice touch for critting work

Joshua Stubbles

Alienbrain is best for artists imo. As ohnein has stated, it has image thumbnails and such. Source Safe, PerForce and Source Depot do not.

sir-knight

hmm, alienbrain looks to be way too far out of the league of what the company is willing to accomodate, but we'll see, I'll make some suggestions in the meeting I have today. I'll explain the situation a bit because I'm curious as how to other studios do it compared to us.

The version control issue stems a little bit from a bigger problem, being our artists generally aren't tech savvy enough to properly use svn, and our source art repository (non exsistent) needs to be somehow integrated with the source code for easy access of just checking out 1 repository for a game project. Our old method was maintaining 2 separate trunks, 1 for production art/code and 1 for source art... and nobody maintained the source art trunk because you have to navigate and find the specific game you're working on in 2 separate trees and then move files back and forth between the 2. Everyone just tended to work with source on their local machine... and we lose stuff when an artist leaves or a computer is formatted.

The devs don't want to put hundreds of megs project related art into the project trees, but if some exempt tags or branches on checkout, while others exempt trunk and tags... I don't understand why they can't exempt an art source directory either.

But as it is right now, things are getting lost or we're wasting time tracking down original assets when the porting of a game to a new device is assigned to another artist that didn't originally do the game.

Seems that tortoise svn (which we already use) has an image diff plugin, anyone have experience with it?