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Managing Assets in Final Fantasy
skia writes "Interesting topic with an even more interesting backdrop: Tracking Assets in the Production of "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within". From the article: "Creative processes don't have clearly defined paths... therefore, the attempt to give a static definition for such process has to face the tension between divergence towards the creative possibilities and convergence towards the pre-defined mechanical process that databases can handle." It also links to Beating the Averages, which is another must-read for /.ers."
There are some commercial products that enables
the check-in/check-out workflow for artists; SGI's
StudioCentral and NxN's Alienbrain, for example.
I've seen some small game studios using Alienbrain.
However, from my experience, file-based version
control doesn't fit nicely to the large production.
There are too many interdependencies among files,
and unlike programming, sometims it is difficult to
separate artists' work into files with the
authoring tools. (Suppose one artist works on
a model and another works on its animation).