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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As a games artist you are trying to make things look as good as you can with as little impact as possible on the computing time needed to draw them. Computers and consoles only have a finite amount of computational time in their CPU (Central Processing Unit) or GPU (Graphics Processing Unit).

When developing a game, the framerate is the performance measuring stick, where 1 frame is equal to the time taken to process everything. In each frame the computer or console must figure out exactly what is going on, where it is happening, what can be seen and what can be heard, then draw what needs to be seen and play the correct sound. The more things the CPU needs to do in a frame means the frame will take longer to complete.

The faster a frame can be processed, the better a game will look and sound. When you see a game running at 3-5 frames per second (fps), it looks awful - it stutters. You can often notice this happening in some racing games - at the first corner in the race before the pack is split up the console is having to compute and draw 20 cars - that’s a lot of data. It can be likened to looking at the world through a strobe light. It is generally unacceptable for games to run at any less than around 25 frames per second. With faster paced games, especially reaction based games such as First Person Shooters (also shortened to FPS, but uppercase), it is important to have even higher framerates. PC gamers often tweak their systems to eek every last framerate boost to give them that edge over their opponents.

So where does all this leave us as artists? Well, we need to make our work as efficient as possible. Sure, a highly detailed model with dozens of large highly detailed textures will look wonderful, but if the hardware can only display that one model on screen, with nothing else - no AI, no sound - then the game will not be much fun, will it? It won’t be some much a game, more of a picture. At the end of the day, you are there to make art for a game, not a game to display your art.

There are 2 hard and fast rules to remember when it comes to helping the framerate:

• Keep your polygon counts lower
• Keep your texture smalls.

One of the most important aspects of working with games is to remember that the end result is a game, not simply a collection of art and sound and code. Since this is important, it sounds like a great place to start the book.

“Of course the end result is a game!” I hear you cry. While it sounds like a simple premise, it is one that is all too easily forgotten. As an artist, your job is to make art for the game, and the game is more important than your work.

I have met more than one person in my career who put the work they had done before the game. These people were convinced that their work (whether art, sound, design, code or other) was perfect and that it should be used exactly as it was with no changes.

It might seem like a cliché, but these days a game is a team effort, and people need to be flexible. You might produce the best piece or work in your entire career, but if it doesn’t fit the game, it will need to be changed.

Not only that, but your artwork is there as a part of the game, to complement the other art, the sound, the AI, the gameplay, held together by magic code glue. You art has to fit into memory with all those other things, so while you might complain about the specs you have been given, the chances are that they were given for a reason.

As an aside, I was once in the situation where a terrible piece of game code had been written, and when several people protested we were told that since it had been written, it was going in - otherwise it would have been a waste of the programmers time.

This was only a few days after several of my completed characters were cut from the game because the story had changed.