Assets Meet Chipmunk, a new way to manage art pipelines

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The team at Thinksquirrel would like you to meet Chipmunk, our brand new art and asset management platform. With Chipmunk, your entire creative process is centralized, accessible to everyone on your team, and integrated directly into your Unity workflow. An elegant solution to maintaining entire libraries of creative content, Chipmunk was built for teams of Unity users first.

Chipmunk allows teams to:

• Create a home for source assets from Photoshop, Maya, Max, and more
  • Convert to Unity-workable file formats instantly and on demand. This includes support for file types not supported by Unity, such as Illustrator or PDF files
• Maintain full revision histories without forcing your creatives into traditional version control solutions, creating a single source of truth
• Add Pipelines to assets—a powerful tool for on demand cloud-based conversion, transformation, and content delivery—with full scripting support
• Reliably deliver new content to end users without the need for time-consuming builds, patches, or action from the user
• Preview and conversion support for over 600 file types, including common 3D formats.

After our announcement at Unite 2016 and closed beta this year, Chipmunk has undergone massive development in order to be ready for its debut today. Sign up today and use Chipmunk for free for the duration of our open beta period.

www.getchipmunk.com​

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Have any questions or feedback? Feel free to reply to this thread!

 

This looks really polished. I think developers with heavy art pipelines have been asking for this for a while.

 

I've been testing out Chipmunk for awhile now. It just keeps getting better and better. We have team members across the US and we now have all game assets in one place that everyone has access to. On top of that, Chipmunk created a Unity plugin that syncs assets to your project seamlessly. It ends up saving a ton of development time.

 

Are there already tools for using this in conjunction with common version control systems?

 

Hey christoph_r,

We don't have any out-of-the-box tools to sync with version control systems right now, but we do have a CLI for Windows and Mac. It could be possible to make a commit hook that uploads changed files as a Chipmunk revision, for example. We had a customer explore this a bit in order to use Chipmunk as a sort of git LFS replacement.

I'd love to chat more about what you're looking for and see what we could do here - did you have any more info? (feel free to get in touch via PM as well)

 

Hey Lily - this looks like a artist solution! Yay.

Would it benefit a solo developer?

A "how to" video showing a common workflow (a character with supporting files) would be really great.

 

You're in luck! We just released a video (attached below). Chipmunk is definitely beneficial for solo developers - it can help save time with exports, keep your project's assets organized, and visually track your art. I have a solo team that I use while I'm not working on building stuff

 

Hi everyone,

We’ve released an update to Chipmunk’s Unity plugin (now on GitHub)! The biggest change is the addition of Pipelines for images, as seen in our workflow video.

You can now create a Pipeline by assembling the following steps in the inspector:

• Resize
• Crop
• Blur
• Auto-Gamma
• Auto-Levels
• Brightness and Contrast
• Border
• Colorize
• Grayscale
• Negate
• Rotate
• Background Color

In addition, we’ve added a scripting API for Pipelines, so you can also specify a sequence of steps to run in your scripts. Here’s a sample:

Code (CSharp):

1. public class PipelineSample: MonoBehaviour
2. {
3.    public ChipmunkTexture myAsset;
4.  
5.    private void Start()
6.    {
7.        var myPipeline = ImagePipeline.Create((builder) =>
8.        {
9.            // Add steps here, in order
10.            builder
11.                .AutoGamma()
12.                .AutoLevels()
13.                .Rotate(90)
14.                .Grayscale();
15.        });
16.        myAsset.pipeline = myPipeline;
17.        myAsset.Import();
18.    }
19. }

Let us know what you think about this new feature!

Thanks,

 

Hi, all!

We’ve been hard at work these last two weeks on a lot of back-end features that will ultimately allow self-service management of your account. This includes the ability to generate the API key necessary for setting up our Unity plugin and CLI tool. Ok, maybe not the most fun update, but we’re excited to give users the ability to do what they want in their accounts, on-demand.

We also wanted to let you know about a much more fun front-end update—comments!

We’re solidifying our take on a system for commenting, both at the asset level (or, more accurately, the “current revision” of an asset) and also the revision level, allowing you to comment on past versions with notes that might be helpful in the future. We’re considering emoji support for replying to comments.

This will be in addition to the existing Description section for the asset as a whole that you’re currently seeing. In future iterations, you can expect features like tagging or mentioning users in these comments, or assigning users when the comment includes pending tasks, etc.

As always, don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you have thoughts about anything we’re working on. Your feedback is so, so helpful.

Thanks folks,

 

We’ve got something fantastic to share: support for viewing FBX files on the web!

As you may already know, FBX is a common 3D format used for both authoring and exchange in Autodesk products, other content creation apps like Substance Painter, and Unity. We also support physically-based rendering through Stingray PBS, which is compatible with newer versions of Maya, Max, Substance Painter, and Unity 2017.2 or newer.



Our snowy ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ friend here had textures assembled together within Maya LT and converted via Chipmunk. In Unity we can use our source FBX file, but we can now also easily view this file on the web without any additional downloads, and export this same file to web-compatible formats (here's a screenshot from Facebook, which just added support for 3D content):



You can check out a guide on how to set up FBX files for Chipmunk here:
https://support.getchipmunk.com/…/351-uploading-fbx-models-…

We’ll be rolling out support for FBX in the next few days.

 

what about pricing ?
can it be self hosted ? in case working from a country with not very stable internet ( China )

 

Wanted to chime in here to say that FBX support is now live for all users!

We're still working out final pricing details, but we can announce that we will be launching with a free plan for small teams. We're aiming at targeting teams of all sizes, including individuals and smaller teams.

At this time, we do not offer self-hosting for our cloud plans.

 

Hi all,

We’re excited to announce that we’ve officially moved out of early access! We’re launching both Chipmunk and our Unity plugin for free. If you haven’t tried it out, get started today!

You can also find our Unity plugin on the Asset Store.

With our launch, we’re releasing a bunch of new features, including:

Comments
Now that you can comment on an asset, you can use the asset’s description for static information and use comments to discuss an asset’s currently-selected revision. This could mean requesting changes, discussing use cases, or leaving a note for future reference. In the future, we’ll be looking at 2D and 3D annotations, as well as the ability to make both comments and annotations directly within the Unity editor as well.

Version control support
Our Unity plugin now supports all major version control systems, including Unity Teams. Use version control to track and sync changes to your codebase while artists and designers utilize Chipmunk’s friendly workflow to seamlessly work with visual content.

Slack integration
Team owners can integrate their Chipmunk team with a Slack channel to receive notifications for comments, and when uploading or modifying assets or collections.

Self-service user management
Team owners can now invite and manage users in their Chipmunk account, and all users can now easily create API keys for the Unity plugin with just a simple click.

Text previews
Most text and script files can now be previewed in Chipmunk.

To all early access users - thanks again for sticking with us so far! We can’t wait to share our victories with you as we move forward.

 

Hi all,

A few updates this week:

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First, we published a case study featuring the team at Reim Entertainment, one of our first teams to adopt Chipmunk into their workflow. Check it out for a view into Chipmunk in its natural habitat.

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Also new this week, you can now earn up to 64 GB of storage for your Chipmunk team, for free! For every friend you invite to Chipmunk who creates a team, we’ll give both of you 1 GB of extra storage (2 GB for Pro subscribers) for a max of 32 GB (64 GB for Pro subscribers).

Head to Get Free Storage in the sidebar of your Chipmunk account to participate and check out our FAQ for more info. If you know anyone who might like to try Chipmunk out for free, now is the time to let them know. (Don’t have a free account yet yourself? Sign up here.)

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Finally, we’re excited to announce that we’re hosting a game jam! The theme, of course, is the chipmunk (yes, the animal). It starts this Friday, April 4 on itch.io. Join us for the chance to win cash from a $500 prize pool. Follow our Twitter account, @getchipmunk, or our jam-specific #chipmunkgamejam hashtag, for updates and cool projects.

As always, thanks for following us as Chipmunk grows, and let us know if you all have any feedback.

 

Hi everyone,

This week I wanted to highlight some Chipmunk features you might not know about.

Create and upload another
When you’re importing a few assets into Chipmunk in a row, instead of clicking Create asset, select the arrow and toggle to Create and upload another instead. Then, the import modal will remain open after submitting so you can immediately import another asset.



Archiving
You can archive an asset so it’s not in your way but still saved to Chipmunk in case you need it later. Archiving a collection will archive all assets in that collection that are not in any other collections. Once you’ve archived a collection or asset, you will have the option to delete it permanently or restore it.

Image file conversion
You can convert files to the type you need in Unity using the Chipmunk plugin. Currently, we support converting image formats to most other common ones. After importing the asset from Chipmunk, change File Type from Original to the type you need and it will be converted.



Sharing
Clicking on the button for an asset or collection will generate a short link to it. Copy this link and share it with another member of your team, or use it as a reference to find the source file or files later.



Thanks again for your support. As always, let us know what you think about these features (or anything you’re seeing).

Take care,

 

Hi everyone,

This week, we’ve added a new tutorial to get started with Chipmunk. You’ll see it when you sign into your team if you haven’t created an asset yet. We hope this helps you get more familiar with Chipmunk.

If you’re already up and running but still want to see the tutorial, you can open it by going to My profile.

The tutorial walks you through creating your first Chipmunk collection, uploading your first asset, and uploading a new revision of that asset.



We are also excited to be attending Collision in New Orleans this week! If you’re also attending and want to meet the team, send us a message on FB or twitter.

Thanks,

 

Hey everyone,

We released a ton of new and updated features in Chipmunk. Most notably, you can now create new assets (or revisions to existing assets) as drafts to take advantage of Chipmunk’s Draft Workflow.

Drafts are unpublished works in progress that can be assigned to team members and then commented on, approved for use, or rejected outright. Uploading files to drafts is optional, so use them without a file to request content from others, as well. Check out our blog post for more on our Draft Workflow as well as other feature updates.

As always, let us know what you think!

• Feedback or questions? Start a conversation in our Facebook group.
• Know anyone who might want to try us out? Invite them to create their own free Chipmunk account and you’ll both earn free storage.

Thanks,

 

Hi all,

We’re excited to announce that we're featured on Product Hunt today!

It would mean a lot for you to stop by and leave a comment if you’re loving what we’re doing with Chipmunk. We can’t wait to get Chipmunk into more hands and believe the features we just rolled out make it that much more exciting!

Thanks,

 

We’re excited to announce in-app conversion, allowing you to download your assets from Chipmunk in the format you need in addition to downloading them in their original file type.

When downloading an image file, select from many common image types to convert the file. This is especially helpful when downloading a source file in a proprietary format (such as from Adobe products) as a production ready format. For 3D models, we also support converting Autodesk FBX to GLB. More on the currently available conversions here.





You can also check out our most recent blog post which covers this feature and how it and others address the problem of finding the right version of the right asset in the right format, when you need it.

We have plans to release many more conversions options soon, so stay tuned for that. Definitely let us know if there are any conversion options you’d love to see.


Thanks,

 

Hey all,

We just added notifications to Chipmunk. We’ll send notifications when someone else modifies or comments on any resources you watch, including changes to draft content. They’re currently exclusively in the app, but we’ll be releasing customizable email and desktop notifications soon. More on notifications in our blog post.

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We’ve also added a new subscription tier, Chipmunk Plus, alongside our Free and Pro plan options.

Plus adds 10 GB of storage per user for up to 10 users. Pay monthly and the cost is $15 per user, per month or save up to 20% with an annual subscription for only $12 per user, per month — a savings of $360 per year for a team of 10. More about Plus in our Pricing FAQ.

Lastly, here's a sneak peek at an exciting feature we’re working on now: Draft Review. Draft Review will allow team members to use annotations and threaded comments to request and approve changes in the process of design iteration without publishing, giving teams unprecedented control over their design workflow.

Please reply if you have any feedback on these features or if you’re interested in previewing upcoming features like Draft Review.

Thanks,