How is Version's Asset supposed to be used?

[John]

Hi there,

For the time being I've been told the version is under the space of asset, which is furtherly belonging to one shot. Whenever you publish a version, an asset is required(either new or existing one).  But I'm not very clear why the version and asset have to be coupled? To  me it leads to inevitable version number clashes between tasks.

Let's say we have a shot to create a rolling crashing car. The animator may specify the asset as "car" when publishing, while the visuall effect artist may specify an exactly the same asset name, i.e. "car". So by the time the animator has 40 "car" version published, the first version of "car" under effect task would be 41, which is confusing(should be 1).

Am I using it in a wrong way? Cheers.

[Mattias Lagergren]

Hi John Su and welcome to the forums.

An asset version (AssetVersion in the API) is a bundle of files that are incrementally versioned (1, 2, 3) et.c. An example of an asset could be a Car model with versions 1, 2, 3 and 4.  Each of the versions can contain a number of different files (called components in ftrack) for different LOD levels or for previewing the model.

Asset (name: Car model, type: Model)
    -> AssetVersion (version: 1)
    -> AssetVersion (version: 2)
    -> AssetVersion (version: 3)
    -> AssetVersion (version: 4)

If the model is to be re-used across multiple shots, he would likely publish this under an "Asset build" in ftrack. An "Asset build" in this case is a folder like object in ftrack (same as Shot, Sequence etc.).  If there are multiple Assets that makes up the Asset build (Shaders, Rigs etc.) they would be published as Assets as well.

Then later when production has started, an animator picks up and import the latest Car model Asset into his scene, does his magic and publish an animation asset to his shot. This is a new Asset with a separate stream of versions:

Asset (name: Crashing car, type: Animation)
    -> AssetVersion (version: 1)
    -> AssetVersion (version: 2)

 

[John]

Hello Mattias thanks for the explanation.

What is confusing me is, why I have to use asset to bundle versions instead of straightforward using task? To me it would be more intuitive.

The asset name "Car" I used as example might be a little bit misleading. Let's say "shooting_stars" as both animator and effect artist need to contribute their work, in the condition that they both need "shooting_stars" as the descriptive name, one of them will be experiencing a hard time when trying to figure out why version num don't start from v1.

I think what I expect is version increasing in under each Task, so artists from different task won't be bothered by potential version num conflict from other tasks(departments). For now this can be done by manually differentiating the asset names between tasks or customizing publishing wrapper using API. But if that's the case the question is back to be, why version is bundled that way?

Version log of "shooting_stars":
Animation	v1	v2	v3		v5	v6
Effect					v4			v7	v8

What I expect:
Animation	v1	v2	v3		v4	v5
Effect					v1			v2	v3

[Lorenzo Angeli]

Hi @John Su, What you are expecting is how actually does work.
I think there's just a confusion here between tasks and asset types.

The first behaviour you are highlighting happens if you do publish the same asset type across different department, 
but if you publish different asset types for different departments you'll end up with the one you are expecting.

Let me try to visualise it for you (we assume to be working under the same shot here):
 

same asset different tasks:

task:Animation (asset:geo)	v1	v2	v3		v5	v6
task:Effect    (asset:geo)			v4			v7	v8

different assets different tasks:

task:Animation (asset:anim)	v1	v2	v3		v4	v5
task:Effect    (asset:fx)			v1			v2	v3

Hopefully this graph will help you out to better understand how tasks, asset, version and asset types are related.
https://help.ftrack.com/developing-with-ftrack/key-concepts/publishing

 

Hope it helps !
L.

 

 

 

[John]

Thanks Lorenzo.

I read the link before. Maybe the confusion is due to of 99% of my experience the asset is coupled with task so I found it unecessary to introduce another layer of version space(specifically in my case). 

Cheers mate.

[Lorenzo Angeli]

Confusion is quite normal when you change the paradigms you are used too.
If you have any other question let us know !
Cheers.

L.