I am a Maya generalist that has been moving sideways into the Technical artist and Pipeline TD role at a small animation/interactive studio (<10 animators). I am embarking on the adventure of starting to use version control (finally) and the brave new world of Git. In parallel with our Unity developers, we’re evaluating Bitbucket Cloud to host repositories, and using SourceTree to manage the version control. I have been scripting in python with PyCharm, and am wondering about the best way to work, in short.
- I would prefer to use SourceTree to really manage the version control stuff, since the interactive team is using it too. Should I then just ignore all the VC features of PyCharm, or is there a recommended way to have them work together?
I am trying to anticipate what a git branch structure might look like for the tools I’m developing, but it seems clear that I should do development and rigorous testing on a development branch before merging to the master branch for deployment. Currently users have a .mod file that points to a network scripts folder with a userSetup.py that creates a custom Maya menu populated with various tools. I have a bunch of questions about that, but for now:
- What’s the simplest way for me to test the development branch version of the tools, while normally having access to the deployed set of tools, but making sure I’m not running one when I think I’m running the other?
I’m at the point of just trying to figure out the right questions to ask, so I’ll leave it there for now, and I appreciate any insight into “best practices” or at least “this works for me”.