Present: Bastien Montagne, Brecht Van Lommel, Dalai Felinto, Julian Eisel, Ton Roosendaal
Meeting to define early development targets and next steps.
Asset Management vs. Browsing
- Asset Management is a huge topic. Many open questions and unknowns.
- Focus on creating an Asset Browser - a UI in Blender to browse assets and edit asset meta-data.
- Asset Management solutions (e.g. Cloud Add-on, BlenderKit, a Kitsu-Blender bridge) should be able to hook into the Asset Browser UI. They remain separate systems from Blender’s core.
- The APIs for that are for later milestones.
From a project perspective, assets management appears on 3 distinct levels:
-
Project
Management of the mass of assets required for the entire project, typically with production tracking software (e.g. Attract). -
TD
Assets assembled for specific shots or persons/departements. -
Artist
A user’s personal collection of assets (may be project specific or not).
Blender will deal with levels 2 and 3. Level 1 will be done in actual production/asset management systems.
User Stories
The project will focus on the following use cases for now:
This map will be updated and expanded on.
Design notes
Some informal design notes for the first iterations:
- Repositories
- Set via Preferences
- Stores .blend files
- Rules needed to define when asset data is (re-)loaded
- “Adding” assets always only for current .blend
- You have to save for assets to be registered!
- Viewer (aka Browser)
- Select assets
- Add properties/meta-data (“edit”)
Process
- Get something tangible to look at and evaluate early.
- Agile process, with iterations of one week, each with defined targets.
(Given Julian’s other responsibilities, the iteration week may have to be spread over 2-3 actual weeks) - Always have a working (even if limited or buggy) system after each iteration.
- First iteration: Initial Asset Browser UI, working for Materials or Objects.