Version control for local project, artist friendly + 101 questions

Suggestions for a version control?

Considerations are:

Only needs to be local

Ease of use/fool-proofness is most important factor for me

99% of work is done outside of unity (dont want to use collab, unless it really is the best option. but so far my experience with it is very negative)


EDIT: Added an additional question:

I actually have a question, really 101 stuff.I don't think it warrants a new thread.

So what I want to accomplish is that when I do work throughout the day, I can just push this to the repo and it only uploads the things I changed. I dont have to go through selectively and find things I changed, copy paste and overwrite, right?

I want to use dropbox because I have terabytes of storage with it. I looked at Github but it seems like it only allows small amounts of storage? I need at least 100gbs worth, so I use dropbox to host the repo since I already have that.

So I create a repo in dropbox. Is this repo where I should do my work in? I don't quite understand, I thought I would do my work in a folder on my machine locally, and then push the files over to the dropbox folder. But playing around with source tree, it seems to want me to do the work in the repo, and then when I commit it, I don't understand how it is going to a separate place exactly?

I get that it is keeping track of changes and I am able to revert my commits, but the basic idea that I have my files in two separate places doesnt seem to be getting accomplished?

Sorry thats really basic question and takes a lot of words to describe, but I appreciate any help. This S*** is hard for me to understand.

 

I would use github. Tbh I only started using it for the first time a month or two ago, when my laptop conked out and I had to do some USB drive wizardry to get important stuff off.

It always seemed complicated because of all these weird terms like 'pull requests'. But it turns out that it's stupidly easy. I use it for everything now.

 

I would second the request of Github Desktop, it's as simple as it can get IMO.

I've thought about this problem before, I would really love Unity Collab if it worked locally too, because that's even more simple, foolproof, and integrated. Being the cloud only limits my project size without any benefits since I'm working solo.

But yes, since Unity Collab is out of the question, Github Desktop is the best option. Very simple git. And as a plus, if you ever need the more advanced features like branches or pull requests, you can use them.

 

thanks guys. i am watching some videos about source tree. seems like it makes things a little more simple and visual for someone like me. Any opinion on that? It's just like, a plugin that makes GUI more visual, right?

 

Source tree actually looks more confusing than GitHub Desktop, because it includes, well, the tree stuff.

If you're the only one using the folder and assets, you probably don't need to consider branches. GitHub Desktop should be fine.

 

Thanks I'll check that out.

 

I actually have a question, really 101 stuff.I don't think it warrants a new thread.

So what I want to accomplish is that when I do work throughout the day, I can just push this to the repo and it only uploads the things I changed. I dont have to go through selectively and find things I changed, copy paste and overwrite, right?

I want to use dropbox because I have terabytes of storage with it. I looked at Github but it seems like it only allows small amounts of storage? I need at least 100gbs worth, so I use dropbox to host the repo since I already have that.

So I create a repo in dropbox. Is this repo where I should do my work in? I don't quite understand, I thought I would do my work in a folder on my machine locally, and then push the files over to the dropbox folder. But playing around with source tree, it seems to want me to do the work in the repo, and then when I commit it, I don't understand how it is going to a separate place exactly?

I get that it is keeping track of changes and I am able to revert my commits, but the basic idea that I have my files in two separate places doesnt seem to be getting accomplished?

Sorry thats really basic question and takes a lot of words to describe, but I appreciate any help. This S*** is hard for me to understand.

 

I think it's worth also checking out "beyond compare" ( https://www.scootersoftware.com/ ). If you just need a clever backup program that allows you to say "copy all the files that changed at location X to location Y", it's a whole lot less hassle than version control imho. It's a different tool for a different job. For keeping different versions of your files you'd have to manually manage that, like saving to a new filename with a _v2 postfix etc.. The big benefit of version control would theoretically be uploading just the parts of a file that changed, but realistically I don't think that works very well with the kinds of files an artist creates.

 

Yeah GitHub definitely doesn't support 100 GB.

Git is more about version control - knowing what specifically was changed between different steps in pseudo text files. That and branching-making local changes to something without it messing up a "main" branch. It's mostly about code.

Something we should have asked first of all: what are you trying to do with this? Just back up your data?

 

awesome @Martin_H , i'll check that out. Sounds like it might be the right tool for me.

@EternalAmbiguity , sorry I should have made that more clear from onset.

Basically I have lots of maya scenes that are being worked on and incrementally saved. The master file gets overridden each time I save so it's always up to date, and incremental saves go into a separate folder. Besides that, I just have tons of images and 3d model files that get output.

The big data comes from the fact that there is big architectural scenes in these maya files, plus lots of large texture files. It takes forever setting all that up so definitely not somethign I want to have to do agian.

I dont really need separate versions at all, just a more ergonomic way to keep things backed up without me having to thumb through everything I did at the end of the day, doing tedious copy/pasting and twisting my brain in a knot.

 

@Martin_H ,

hey so i just tested trial of beyond compare. In 2 minutes I am able to accomplish what I wanted without any trouble. I think this fits the bill perfectly.

Thanks!

I'm still open to any suggestions but for now I'll roll forward using this software.

 

Sounds like Beyond Compare is perfect for your usecase . Depending on how big your Maya files get, it maybe worth looking into ways to link highres meshes as proxies from other files. I don't know if Maya can do that as easily as Blender, but it might be a way to keep versioning of highres meshes and assembling assets etc. in different files so that the one you save lots of versions of stays smaller, and the one with the highres meshes hopefully doesn't need as many versions saved. Like for example when I import a highres mesh that I don't want to change anymore, I don't want to save those additional megabytes every time I save my blender file to a new version. So I'll stick it in a separate file an link it from there if I think it's worth it to save the space.

 

I think the maya equivalent you are talking about would be saving as alembic or geometry caches. It's very useful. There is also some referencing capabilities but I'm not real familiar with that yet.