hello. I’m working on a small team of no more than 5 people in Unreal Engine! All the members of our team are artists, so SVN and Perforce feel difficult to use, so it is difficult to approach them. So we tend to copy/paste the uasset file in Windows Explorer or use the migration function.
The direct copy/paste method of uasset files was used early in the project because it is convenient to share assets with team members. However, assets with complex dependencies are rarely used these days because they seem to cause errors easily.
Using the migration feature is preferred by our team as long as the folder structure is well aligned among the team members, it can be moved reliably with almost no errors. However, even in a situation where a small asset is shared, you must create an empty project that matches the folder structure, put the assets there, compress the uproject folder, and share it with your team members. I find this packaging process cumbersome.
Moving on to source control-based collaboration is a mid- to long-term goal, but at the moment it is difficult to learn SVN or Perforce… In this situation, is it best to use the migration function as mentioned above? Advice please!
Even artists need to learn to work with source control. Saying “we think source control is hard” is a little bit like a student driver saying “using the reverse gear in cars is hard, I will only go forwards.” It’s just not sufficient – you have to learn it. It’s part of the craft, even if it’s not the fun part of the craft.
That’s what it’s for. That’s the tool. You need to set up either Perforce or Git, and stick with it. (I’d recommend against SVN these days, unless you have someone who has lots of scripts and experience with it and will be the support person for you.)
For both Git and Perforce there are hosted options where you can pay someone else to run the server, and you just run the client. Or you can run your own, if you have someone who likes doing that kind of thing. But you have to do it! Perforce has the benefit of letting you “lock” an asset so that nobody else accidentally edits it at the same time; git doesn’t give you that, but it’s open source so the yearly cost is less.
My advice: Bite the bullet, pay for a Perforce host, and learn to use it.
You are really right. The analogy of driving a car makes me realize my question is stupid. My team needs to move quickly to source control collaboration.
However, I have no background in server-client, networks. I checked a lot of learning resources on the Perforce official site, Google, and YouTube for the past few months, and I got the impression that they were written on fragmented topics and contained a lot of jargon, so it was difficult to learn.
Can you recommend a well-structured learning resources for artists? I will gladly use my time after work and on weekends to learn.
Nothing’s perfect, and it’s always better to learn something with someone who has used it in anger, so you might want to look for “has perforce experience” as a checkbox in some future hire your team makes.
It’s the same with “good with Houdini procedurals” or “understands Blender control rigs” or whatever. It’s another skill you may need, which not all people have. Our world is just so darn complex :-/