Review Pipelines

Pipelines
#1

At our company we’ve been developing our asset-task pipeline for Maya and Photoshop for a while, but lately we’ve been trying to make some advancements in this field.

This currently is done over mails, some over Jira. But this isn’t efficient. Do you suggest any approving solutions available to look into. API integration required.
We have checked out Revolver (Shotgun review platform), but as gaming company we feel it’s too focused on reviewing video material and hard to integrate into custom versioning pipeline.
We are looking for local solution, uploading assets to outside servers is out of the question. Also pay-once pricing model is prefered.

We need to review playblasts, videos, pdfs, photoshop, illustrator, indesign files.

#2

You could try to build something using Tactic (http://www.southpawtech.com/) which is similar in spirit to Shotgun but is open source and python based so it’s pretty easy to extend…

In general, tools with good review pipelines seem to be very ‘Hollywood’ - focused on managing big distributed teams with lots of forward scheduling and management overhead. I want something lighter, more agile and less heavy handed (and based on Perforce, not just file names with numbers! It’s 2014, people!) but I haven’t found it yet…

#3

@Theodox, thanks for the answer, I will look into Tactic, but their site really avoids giving out information about product :slight_smile:

I know review pipelines are mostly meant for video production companies and our team is still pretty small, but work on really diverse level of brand management and with small team agile review solution is necessary. We tested Shotgun and Ftrack for asset management, but they are too rigid. I would honestly prefer just set of tools that I can connect and code together into our existing pipeline creating based on our teams wishes.
Funnily enough we didn’t chose Perforce because of price at first, but numbered files with proper publishing tool worked out really good, sometimes that really works well when you need legacy support, which we constantly do.

I might try to find any tools that offer review/approval which can stand as base for video and image review (picture markup), frame by frame markup,…

#4

Perforce does have Swarm which is their code review tool.

Whats interesting is that it has a basic 3d viewer, though currently only supports a few formats (obj, dae, stl), and doesn’t support any animation.

Its something that I’ve wanted to poke around with to see how extendable it is, and how artist friendly the interface is, but I’ve not really had the chance yet, and if all else fails I might get a decent code review tool out of it.

#5

Shotgun is pretty good, but it’s expensive and definitely focused on video.

I didn’t have a very good experience with Tactic. On paper, it fits the bill, but it’s got a lot of drawbacks in practice.

Swarm is actually very nice, and it does have some limited support for side by side image comparison of versions. It’s extensible (written in PHP). It’s really close to being a good solution, but would take some customization. Of course, you have to pony up for p4 and swarm if you have more than 20 users.