Hello Shotgun community! I’m from the Autodesk Automotive team and we’ve been working to standardize multi-project workflows within Shotgun Toolkit!
Why are we doing this?
Just like in many feature films, video games or television series, automotive design teams need to re-use already built assets/components across projects. Our customers are using this new capability to build an asset library and to re-use assets across projects.
What’s New?
To improve this workflow, we’ve done 3 things.
1. “Linked Projects” Field
In the last few months, we pushed a new field called “linked_projects” on the Asset entity that lets you link Assets to multiple projects. By simply linking one asset to a different project you use the Loader to import or reference these linked assets.
In this example, I use library assets and link them to a destination project
2. Import Linked Assets with the Loader
In our key engines of Alias and VRED, we’ve added a tab to the loader to easily import/reference these linked Assets. You can add this same logic to the engines that you use. Here are the Alias and VRED Loader settings for your reference.
We want to hear from you! Does this workflow fit for your film, animation or games production? Reply (via this community post) and let us know your feedback!
That’s great! It something I asked for a long time!
Do you think there’s an upside of using this workflow for studios that already made custom solutions to make possible to load/publish assets across projects? Currently this workflow works for us, but many concessions were had to be made and a considerable amount of code had to be written.
For example, is this linked field available else where? Shots/Sequences/Custom entities? The big problem with doing last time I looked was that it was impossible to link entities between projects, was this fixed?
Hi! Rob here from the SG team. Can you explain more what you mean when you say “For example, is this linked field available else where? Shots/Sequences/Custom entities?”
Are you talking about sharing Shots or Sequences between projects?
Hello Rob! No, I’m asking about linking Assets from one project to another project’s Shot/Sequence/Custom Entity.
The workflow would be the following:
We have assets A, B and C in the our Asset Library project. I want to link asset A and B to shot_10 and asset C to shot_20 of project Foo. So when an artist opens shot_10 he or she can import asset A and B, but not asset C, since it isn’t linked with that shot. Is that clear?
Are linked assets “pushed” to a show “from” the asset library, or are they “pulled” from the show? Do the asset library line items show up in the show assets list in the web interface, or is this only in the loader apps?
Hey everyone, thanks so much for all the feedback and questions. I’ll start by clarifying some things and then move to answer your questions.
First of all, I want to mention this isn’t suppose to be an official asset library. While we built it to perform a bunch of those functions, its still definitely an unofficial way to work, but we are trying to make that better step by step.
To your question @vtrvtr , about support for linking cross project assets with other entities. Honestly, we haven’t gone that deep yet (solely focused on assets as assets for now), but its a great idea and we definitely understand the need. Something we will put in the backlog for sure.
To @m1jackson, your question around a push or pull. I would be hesitant to use those terms for this. Very simply we are looking to share assets via the Loader by creating a link between Assets and Projects. We haven’t done anything fancy other then creating this relationship, enabling the Loader to see it and reference it, and then the breakdown2 to update that reference.
To the second part about seeing these Assets. Something that you may not be aware of is this little button “Disable Standard Page Project Condition”, that removes the overall project filter from a page. This will let you see Assets for a Project where some are Project specific, but others are linked from somewhere else.
I’ve got Qt errors (as far as I remember) with the new SB2 app, not the old one, which is working fine.
So, about the new one, do you have an ETA for It?
Can you share the error message you are seeing so we can take a look? I don’t think we came across any issues with Houdini on the first pass, but its definitely possible something came up since.
While the app is fairly new, all the latest updates are already released, all be it, our team has been mostly focused on Alias, VRED & Maya.
Thanks!
@btasker Is there any way to automatically share all current and new assets of project-A (eg a library project) with ALL other projects?
I’d rather not have to go down the path of using an event daemon to achieve this.
As I understand things, in the current implementation, any new Assets added to our studio library need manually shared with all projects, and any new projects need added to the linked_projects of all library assets.
Brandon is away for a few more weeks so I will gladly jump in here.
Yes, your understanding is correct about how to make any library Assets available to newly created Projects.
As you mention, an event daemon script could probably solve this, possibly a webhook as well, but let’s see if we can figure out a more ideal solution.
I have logged an issue in our backlog to investigate this further - “Automatically assign library Assets to newly created Projects”.
Thanks for this input and all of your participation here in the community, we appreciate it!
Thanks for the reply, Rob.
I’m using Houdini 19.5 with py3.7.
Well, I can do another try on the bk2. What’s the best way to get It? (I’ve previously cloned from the repo)
