Hi all,
I will be taking a position with a large organization in the coming weeks. Overseeing digital assets will be part of my responsibilities, so I’m trying to do some homework. Can anyone recommend any online resources for learning about managing large sets of CAD files? Wondering about simultaneous “check-out” and revision history, etc.
tx,
dh
Greetings Delcan,
Rhino writes a temporary file to the directory where the file editing is happening - which locks the file against being written to by anyone except the first user to open it. Everyone else must ‘save as’. So far as I know that is the only built in safeguard. There may be a third-party file management utility that performs check-in and check-out, but how to reconcile the work of several designers within a single assembly without overwriting? That is the question.
With Rhino it boils down to best practices in file naming and directory creation
Use very simple rules that everybody understands clearly and are extremely easy to follow. Your goal is to prevent people from creating files named “final3.3dm” in directory “New folder (3)”…
A few conventions like a three-letter prefix, a descriptive name and the date in a sort-able format such as 2016-09-30.
Directories with names that starts with a number (002-XXX) so they are always in the same order can help navigation.
Interesting topic. The file locking is just a “nice try” to pevent any damage. But it is annoying for person B if person A just opened a 3dm file without wanting to change it. B has to call A “please close the file”, then B has to open it (owns the lock) and A can open it again for any “read only” purposes. Using a version control system where you explicitely have to check out a 3dm to get rid of the read-only-“protection” is more intuitive - my opinion. Everyone can open a file “read only”, the first who checks out a file is able to change it.
Ten or more years ago I had to use Microsoft’s Visual SourceSafe (VSS), which was no fun at all but was a simple solution for this scenario. Don’t know if CVS / Git / whatsoever was as easy to handle as VSS.
Thus, I’m quite interested in further answers from users that use any kind of version control system.
Thanks, all. I appreciate the feedback and look forward to hearing more ideas.
dh
This, of course, is one of the many reasons why large engineering organizations use software like CATIA. Also, they can afford it.
I hate to mention it; but Autodesk vault basic can integrate with rhino via a rhino2vault plugin for rhino which allows you to checkout & open files then save back to the vault asset management system.
Vault used to be an unlicensed product (as of 2016) and could be installed from any product design suite trial (from the additional tools) without need to register… Don’t know if that’s still the case?
Beyond that I found lots of digital asset management tools around but not many/any of them support all our files (rhino/C4D/3ds/Dwg/rvt/etc) out of the box. From my investigating it’s because they’re appear to be focused on image/advertising companies & their file types/workflows.
The exceptions are things like alien brain, and some others which are focused on a particular 3D sector’s workflow(or just film or just game).
Then there’s The BIG guys who have integration with their file types/workflows but no one outside this without costly customisation ie. Dassult, Autodesk and a whole bunch of specialist asset management companies who’s websites don’t show prices just ask you to contact them for a specialist quoting et. (Which translates to “you can’t afford it” in my book).