Version control for 3d and art...

Hi,

I'm a bit conflicted about version control at the moment, and was hoping to get some input. I've used Subversion for quite some time, and love it for coding projects, it's the best thing since popcorn and I wouldn't do without it.

In the past I've also used it at work for 3D and animation project, which generally generates much larger amounts of data than code. We haven't used it for render output, but pretty much everything else. At one point we had a single repository that contained about 80gigs of data, though that was more of an exception rather than the rule.

While subversion is great in that it keeps things organized, as the extra mental step of adding and commiting files makes people more aware of what they're doing. When only saving to a shared file system, people have a tendency to put a lot of garbage files all over the place for some reason. For non-code files it has the following problems:
1. It's slow, checking out and commiting changes can take quite some time on big files.
2. It's used by non-coders. Artists tend to have trouble with using it and understanding it properly. Reverting to older versions is hard for them.

I'm more and more leaning towards just using a good incremental backup system and setup routines to keep the file structure clean. Though, I would love to hear your opinions.

I don't know how much better it'd be, but this site is entertaining at least: why git is better than svn/bzr/mercurial.

I'm trying to herd the group of mathematicians I work with at the moment onto using an svn repository provided by the university, so I'd also be interested in people's opinions on getting non-coders to use versioning systems.

http://www.give-soft.com/

we use subversion too, but only for actual runtime media not .max and .psd files which is all backed up locally.

hmm - is that Tortoise subversion ? or is subversion something that can be used with a myriad of other Versioning control systems ?

Dont us MS sourcesafe! we are forced to use it at work and it causes no end of stress. I seem to spend more time effing around with it than i do coding.

Yeah, I'd to use Visual Source Shaft, i mean safe. Maybe thats why I think Tortoise is so user friendly - cuz VSS does make you Efff....

Tortoise Subversion is a Windows GUI frontend to subversion, so yeah it's basically the same thing. There are several other frontends available for it, and it has been integrated in IDE's like Eclipse (as far as I know).

Subversion itself is a command line tool and server that runs on many different OS's (Win, OSX and Linux at least).

For those not comfortable with the command line, we've used RapidSVN, which is another GUI frontend. The result has been less than stellar. When you have users that have a problem understanding what files are on their cmoputer and what files are on a network share, the extra abstraction of having to check out files, update etc., causes some confusion. The biggest problem seems to be that they forget to update, and then wind up with conflicts (files modified by them and someone else), that they don't know how to solve. For coders, this never seems to be a probelm though (I guess mathematicians would do fine too). :)

Discussed this with a friend today. While the ideal solution would be a system that was slightly easier for beginners to use, yet faster than subversion. For media files there would be no need to do diffing of files, so a simple copy (which would be much faster) would do. Though, writing this kind of system from scratch is not the easiest thing to do, especially considering that it has to be more or less 100% error free. So, I'm not sure what solution or combination of solutions we will settle on.

thanks for the clarification ragtag - I wonder if RapidSVN > Tortoise or vicky versy ?

Tortoise is probably better than RapidSVN, except that Tortoise is Windows only. RapidSVN is a standalone application, unlike Tortoise that is integrated in windows explorer.

we use dreamhost to host our SVN repository, unlimited space unlimited monthly bandwidth, as many SVN repositories as you want included for $6 a month.

It's been pretty reliable so far, probably had 2-3 bad days of unpredictable behaviour in 18 months.