danni.coy Posted August 15, 2012 Share Posted August 15, 2012 Originally I was going to request the addition of tags the xml files used for assets (materials,nodes mostly). What we want to know which 3dStudioMax file the asset is generated from and which of our artists is responsible for generating the asset. I have however since hit upon the idea of using XMP sidecar files for this purpose. This might have the additional advantage of being able to tag and search assets using 3rd party tools (digikam for instance works really well with at least dds files and xmp sidecar files). Taking this approach I am a bit concerned about the number of files in the data tree and this might make that problem worse. Some indication of what Unigine has planned for this area would be useful. Link to comment
steve3d Posted August 15, 2012 Share Posted August 15, 2012 agreed, this will be much useful. But problem is Adobe's XMP Toolkit don't support dds file and ungine's mesh/smesh file... Link to comment
danni.coy Posted August 15, 2012 Author Share Posted August 15, 2012 agreed, this will be much useful. But problem is Adobe's XMP Toolkit don't support dds file and ungine's mesh/smesh file... That just means that we won't be able to use the XMP toolkit for this. As far as I can tell XMP is a subset of RDF so using RDF libraries could be an alternative as might using exiv2. Fortunately the file spec is open and other software vendors do support arbitary mime-types attached to XMP side car files. I am not aware any alternative that is anywhere nearly as widely used but I am open to suggestions. (newer xml based formats like open-raster embed xmp inside the file format - another area where adobe is suffering from NIH syndrome). Link to comment
Guest shane.ploenges Posted August 20, 2012 Share Posted August 20, 2012 Hi, we are currently trying to come up with an Asset management and library system to allow us to share assets across projects from a central library. The asset management software we are using is NXG Alien Brain. The current problem i am having is that when you build and export Node files in Unigine - all of the paths are absolute to where you created that asset, so material and mesh references are no longer valid if you try to import this asset (Node) into another world. Our plan is to have all assets stored in alien brain (With no absolute paths) and have a tool to select a project to deploy the asset to, and then the individual files are placed into the correct folders in the project - currently the paths will not let this happen easily without having a tool to strip paths from the files and add new ones. Is it possible in Unigine to not have the absolute path added from the world you are in? As a way around this i have considered making a world called "library" where we make our assets, and a matching folder in each project so that the paths match as a workaround. Is anyone else trying to share assets amongst multiple projects? and if so how have you done it? Thanks in advance. Link to comment
ulf.schroeter Posted August 21, 2012 Share Posted August 21, 2012 Shane, unfortunately the problem with absolute resource pathes has already been posted more than one and a half year ago without any reaction from UNIGINE crew. It really a bad thing that everybody has to encounter the same problems again and again.... Link to comment
danni.coy Posted August 21, 2012 Author Share Posted August 21, 2012 Shane -- Unigine itself works best using relative paths. In our case I modified the Maxscript scripts to do what we need them too. The current approach is to tokenize outgoing paths locate the folder named data starting from the top of the tree. This means that you can't have a path inside data called data but otherwise works quite well. Node files are written with the relative paths. It's a relatively small job to fix but it would be better upstream support would be better. Link to comment
manguste Posted August 23, 2012 Share Posted August 23, 2012 Shane, unfortunately the problem with absolute resource pathes has already been posted more than one and a half year ago without any reaction from UNIGINE crew. It really a bad thing that everybody has to encounter the same problems again and again.... Ulf, it was fixed a long time ago. @All Our policy is: resources under data folder are always saved with a relative path. If they go outside data folder, an absolute path is used. So, shared resources under data folder are not a problem (it'll just work without any additional tricks). If you want shared resources to be outside this folder, the idea is as follows: you will need to patch the editor so it truncates the pass as necessary. Link to comment
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