Art asset management in companies

[MahtiKebab]

Hello,
I would like to ask people who have worked/works as artists for any kind of company about their asset management. What kind of asset management are you using? Subversion, perforce, alienbrain for example? How do you take care of large scenes which have props made by several artists? For example a game level/scene which includes several houses/objects and has 3 artists doing it, managing both the big file and the different props.

Thanks!

[germball]

Generally asset management is broken into 2 parts, art and code. Many studio will use Perforce for code and Alienbrain for art/design. Some will use Perforce for everything, but you would never ever use Alienbrain for code.

Recently I have notice some studios starting to look at other solutions such as Hansoft and TACTIC.

Regarding managing large scenes with lots of assets, it will be a mixture of Alienbrain, for example, to manage the actual scene files and textures, but you would use referanced models in the your large scene (Xrefs in Max).
This makes things neater instead of having to load every single asset and LOD mesh into one great big scene. In XSI, I set up my models and upon the main scene load, only the lowest resolution of asset is loaded, thus making scene load pretty quick. I can even load a big scene up with no assets in there at all and the selectively choose which ones to load in.
For characters I can keep my rig and skinned mesh seperate, so I can import my animation rig as a referance and skin my character, yet the actula scene with the rig sits elsewhere and can be edited seperately. Providing there are no big breaks, I can then update my skinned character whenever there's an update to the rig.

Of the main 2 apps, XSI's system is probably the best I've used. Maya's was bad, but has got alot better and is a very close second. Max's Xrefs are awful and have been bad for years.
Overall all 3 still need more work. Referanced models is such an important feature, yet is often overlooked

[Craig Lewis]

Germball, I like how you manage to shoehorn some XSI love in all of your posts.

Mahtikebab, as germball said, generic reusable props are generally referenced in. Though for the two companies I've worked at so far, they've both had their own plugin which shows up a catalogue of meshes to drop into your level.

[germball]

lol, well I'm using alot of XSI at the moment, due to studio transition, but I'm not shoehorning, nor am I a fanboy. I'm simply telling it how it is, nothing more, nothing less.

You point about using a studio writing a plugin is well made, and many people do this, and why, well, its simple. It's because the referancing in the 3D apps is bloody poorly implemented in the first place. Maya's system is actually very close to XSI's, but we found the XSI system slightly easier to use, mainly because it was rewritten quite recently, so its had the benifit of a rethink. Maya's was basically patched up so it worked the way it should have done in the first place, and it is alot better now.
Max, well Xrefs have been a problem for years. If the Max dev guys actually put their minds to it, they could improve this feature a great deal.
But this was actually what I meant in my last point of the previous post, for such an important feature, none of the main 3 have nailed their systems, and they still have some work to do. But the XSI system is by far the best of a bad bunch, the coolest things about it, is that you can actually edit and apply operators on top of the referenced model, so you can apply shaders, envelopes, UVs onto the referenced model, without haviong to go back to the original asset, which is very handy if you want to keep the original asset clean and pure. This is clearly the way forward now with using referenced models and Maya have also added a very similar system.

[lefix]

i have only worked on 2 indie game projects so far, but both times we used subversion

[blanktarget]

We use perforce at my workplace. How is alienbrain? I've not heard of it.

[Cryrid]

Naming conventions + Subversion/SVN

[McGreed]

Can anyone mention any good freeware alternatives to alienbrain?

[MahtiKebab]

Thanks all for your replies. SVN definitely lacks many important things compared to Perforce/Alienbrain in what comes to art asset management. We're going to try Perforce tomorrow on a 2 man project and see how it performs.

Btw I found Project Overlord (Give Software LLC) today, seems ok, pricing more than ok, only problem is that I'd like to hear some convincing customer stories before setting up all of our art assets on this software.

Any major/minor differences between Perforce and Alienbrain?

Germball: Hansoft is really nice, we're actually using it. It's just not for asset management, it's a project management soft that has a little document manager too.

[Talon]

We used SVN for the artwork (and code) on our mod. It's far from perfect, especially as some of the texture files are massive (but that's more a problem with uploading/downloading files for a team that's spread across the globe) and some of the artists shied away from it because it's not particularly user-friendly but it did the job ok.

We use Alienbrain at work just now and at my last job we used an AlienBrain-like system that was integrated with the game engine's editor. They're a bit more artist friendly than SVN and geared up more for art asset management.

I've heard mixed stuff about Overlord. As far as I can tell it's decent enough for the money but not quite up to the likes of AB.