Digital Assets Versioning Workflow

[pullpullson]

 

Hello everyone, 

 

I am currently setting up an asset pipeline for a project in houdini. My main question I have is how I handle the versioning of Digital Assets. I prepared an overview where you can see basically the 2 ways I came up with: 

 

The One option is the" self contained" one. When ever you want a new version of your asset you:

1.duplicate the subnet where you work in.
2.Then you have "subnet_v002" that gets turned in to a digital asset "asset_v002.hda" with the definition "asset::2.0"

Every new version gets its own asset library and in every library there is only ONE definition of an asset as you can see in the picture. This workflow is good if on your drive you only want one .hda file associated with one asset version. 

 

The other option is the packed one. Same as the other when ever you want a new version of your asset you:

1.duplicate the subnet where you worked in.
2.But then you don't create a seperate library you only have one library with multiple definitions. One definition for one version. That means if the library asset.hda already exists with the definition asset::1.0 you will append the latest definition asset:2.0 to the library. 

In this case you have all the definitions packed in to one library. For me this option is a little confusing in that sense that you dont have a file seperation of the different versions and one asset library can become potentially huge in file size. 

 

One big point of assets is being able to update the assets in a houdini scene easily without destroying relations to other nodes.  No when it comes to that for option "packed" as every version is in the same library you can simply write a script that updates all nodes with the same library to latest definition is that correct? 

But if i like the file seperation on disk for each new version, HOW would I in option "self contained" update my "asset_v002.hda" with asset::2.0 to "asset_v003.hda" with asset::3.0 as a definitio?
All of this should happen kind of automated so I am searching a python way to do this. 

I would be really interested if anyone has update solution for the option "self contained" and what you generally think which option is the better one to handle digital assets. 

 

Thanks a lot

Paul 

 

 

 

Edited November 23, 2019 by pullpullson

[ftaswin]

You can have multiple files for each hda. as long as the naming is consistent, It'll show up in the same nodetype.

Also when you want to tweak the hda, it is good practice to "copy" the hda into  user's otlpath and put version 0 (overwriting any existing ones) into it. Once user is happy they can publish it back to a shared otlpath as a new version.