As an artist working with a team of others in the games industry, you will no doubt be using a content management system, and one of the most common in the market today for artists is Alienbrain by Avid/SoftImage.

Alienbrain is very powerful system, but for a new artist it can be a daunting application. The purpose of this post is to break it down to the core elements, the information that you’ll want to know on your first day at work when you’re confronted with it for the first time. To be perfectly honest, it may well be enough information for most artists for the majority of the time they use it.

What is it?
In many respects Alienbrain is like a version of Windows Explorer with added file protection/sharing/backup functionality. It allows users to share a file, but prevents several people from editing a file at the same time. It’s a content management system that backs up everything you choose from your hard disk to a central server. Alienbrain also stores a copy of every change to a file when you save a file, or “Check In”, to Alienbrain.

This means several things - since the files are stored on a central server, any artist on your team can edit art assets created by any other user. A server copy of each file means that a local hard disk failure doesn’t mean the loss of days or even months of work. Since the server makes backup copies of every file when it is saved to the server, any change is reversible.

Common Actions
There are only a few core actions - Import, Check Out, Check In and Get Latest.

• Importing a file is what happens when you first add a file that exists on your hard disk to Alienbrain. From that point the file exists in two places, a master server copy and a local copy on your hard disk, and both are write protected
• When you wish to make changes to a file, you must perform a Check Out - you find the file in Alienbrain and give yourself write access to it. At this stage your computer will copy the latest version from the server to your hard disk.
• When you have finished working with a file, you will perform a Check In - this copies your changes to the server, making an invisible backup of the previous version, and makes the file read-only again.
• Get Latest does exactly as you’d expect - it gets the latest version of the file from the server. On larger projects there may be several of you working a single asset, so as one person is rigging a model, another person may be editing textures. When you come to export the file, you’ll want to make sure you have all the current resources.

What do the icons mean?
Alienbrain marks all files with an icon so that you tell the status of a file at a glance. I’ve pulled together an image with the 7 most common (there are a few others), and I’ll explain what they mean.

• my_file_01.tga has a little disk icon on it, which means that it is a local copy and doesn’t exist on the server. This file needs to be imported
• my_file_02.tga is the standard icon for an imported file that no-one is currently editing.
• my_file_03.tga has a little red tick - this means that you have checked this file out for editing, but haven’t modified it
• my_file_04.tga also has a little red tick, but the entire document icon is red. In this instance you’ve checked the file out, and you’ve made changes. This is Alienbrains way of telling you that you’ve not committed these changes, and that you need to perform a Check In
• my_file_05.tga is ghosted - this is a file that exists on the server, but you don’t have a local copy of. A Get Latest will copy the file to your computer
• my_file_06.tga has a black tick, which means that some other user has checked this file out for edits. You can’t edit this file (but can view it)
• my_file_07.tga is half and half - you have a old copy of this file, someone else has edited it and checked a new version into the server.

Hopefully this brief overview will give new artist an anchor point on their first few days in a job. Although it is Alienbrain specific, the basic principles are the same in many version control systems.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 16th, 2007 at 11:18 pm and is filed under Article, GAFB, Games Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.