Asset Storage

[Milan Kolar]

Hi guys.

I've been digging through documentation and support pages trying to find some information about file and folder structures in ftrack. We'll soon be running production with hundreds of assets and literally thousands of shots and we'd like this to be managed through proper publishes and versioning. However the only mention I found in documentation about this was following:

 

Asset storage

In the current version of ftrackplugins for Maya we only support our own predefined directory structure:

/ / / / files

This will be extended with custom plugin support in later versions.

 

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That doesn't tell me much though. I could swallow predefined directory structure if it's really well though out, but I'd like to see what this structure is before we commit to it. I'm planning to plug in multiple softwares into this (even though some of them won't have direct integration liek celAction for instance).

 

If you could give any pointers or clarification about how is ftrack actually handling the files themselves that would be great. I can see that the information is handles very elegantly, but I'm a bit unsure about the rest.

 

Thanks a lot

 

Milan

[Björn Rydahl]

Hi Milan,

 

the new version (2.5) with locations support handles files much better. Then you are able to specify exactly how you want things to be stored.

 

We will contact you by email about upgrading to the latest version.

 

Cheers

[Milan Kolar]

Perfect. Thank you

[rdurnin]

Pardon me for bumping this, but can I have the documentation for the 'predefined directory structures' that are being defined and where?

 

Thanks,

r

[Mattias Seebergs]

The predefined directory structure is:

 

[project code] / [relative asset path prefix] / [episode name] / [sequence name] / [shot name] / [asset type] / [asset name] / [version number] (/ [file])

 

relative asset path prefix is set in Settings > Advanced > Advanced settings.

 

The above structure is defined in the Maya plugin. If you want to use your own custom structure, have a look at Locations.

[rdurnin]

Awesome, although it looks like one of the local Administrators has modified it and it will have to be reset. Please let me know if the path you listed requires any modifications to be run.

 

Is there a lucidity template (within the API) that I can use to build paths against it?

 

r

[rdurnin]

So... How do you guys conceptualize building directories for Asset or Shot Tasks? This path looks like a top-level asset publish directory, but doesn't seem to contain any notion of Task.

 

Is there a way, in the API, to query what Tasks live on an Entity and to factor them into directory creation? At present, this path would leave different departments writing over each other, or would encode the Task (Modelling, Animation, etc) into the asset name, but I have been unable to find a way to search 'task' objects for the Tasks which have been assigned beneath them.

 

r

[Mattias Seebergs]

The path I listed is predefined and not possible to change in the plugins so no modification is required.

 

At present we don't include Lucidity templates within the API, but take a look at the ClassicStructure and the ConnectStructure included in the API for some inspiration. The ClassicStructure builds the following directory structure, for instance (can be slightly different depending on your setup):

 

[project code] /publish/shots/ [sequence name] / [shot name] / [asset name] / [task name] / [asset type] / [version number] / [file]

 

You can get tasks on an entity (shot for instance) by calling the getTasks method.

 

 

Mattias