Sun 5th Aug 2012 | News
<b>Southpaw Technology's TACTIC is now available free of charge to digital content creators.</b>
Southpaw Technology, developer of production asset management (PAM) technology for digital content creators, has announced that it has released its technology under the Eclipse Public License, an OSI (Open Source Initiative) approved open source license. Effective immediately, any team, studio, department or enterprise creating digital content can download TACTIC for free and start using it to manage their assets, projects and creative workflow. The Company will continue to offer support packages, professional services and commercial licenses to entities who prefer or require such licenses.
“It’s time to re-think how companies approach asset management, project management and workflow,” said Gary Mundell, CEO of Southpaw Technology. “TACTIC is now being used across multiple industries, where every company has its own unique workflow, and needs a foundational product like ours to streamline that workflow. We are aware that removing the restrictive licensing fees is a win-win for everyone. Without upfront costs, customers can gain access to a very mature and very flexible production asset management solution that they can adapt to their internal toolset and processes, without any restrictions. And if those companies need assistance, they can come to the TACTIC experts, us.”
The open source code will initially be available from Southpaw Technology in a new product called TACTIC TEAM. Downloadable from Southpaw’s site, TACTIC TEAM is a desktop version of TACTIC that is ideal for smaller teams and for the evaluation of TACTIC’s core features. Once users get accustomed to TACTIC TEAM, they can upgrade to the more robust TACTIC ENTERPRISE with or without assistance from the Southpaw support staff.
Southpaw Technology has produced a handful of tutorial videos to get new users started, as well as launched a community forum where users can share information, code, add-ons, and insights. Southpaw will continue to offer commercial licenses to any company, educational institute and governmental agency who so desires them. In addition, Southpaw will maintain it’s Premium Support and Professional Services offerings for those companies that require assistance in customizing TACTIC to their specific environment.
<b>Related links:</b>
[Open Source TACTIC](http://www.southpawtech.com/opensource)
I need to source this to CGSociety, as that’s where I heard it from.
I heard about the announcement while I was at SIGGRAPH and have been evaluating it for the last week or so (using the VM image, if you’re curious). It’s definitely a big pipeline tool. I’m just scratching the surface of what it can do, but I’m pretty sure I’ve wrapped my head around how it works. I’m sure I’ll run into some expected issues, but with a bit of work I think it might serve well as a replacement to my current shoehorned Redmine solution.
Perfect, I heard about it at SIGGRAPH too, at the Open Sourced Pipeline Frameworks BoF!
I’m having a bit of a problem to set it up because I’m not a developer.
So with the vmware image, you just set it up on vmware and run it, or you have to set a postgres and things like that?
The VMware image works pretty much out of the box. I’m actually using it in Virtualbox. The only thing that was a bit tricky for me was that I’d forgotten to set up a bridged network on my host machine. You could probably also get it working with host-only networking if you’re only testing it on a single box. I wanted to be able to connect to it from anywhere in my network. The TSI Setup and Install documentation was very helpful in getting everything up and running.
Updating this thread - in case anyone is looking for the info on Tactic.
You use tools like Tactic to help manage the production process. If you have a team of users it helps coordinate who is creating, what assets (i.e. concept reference art, models, textures, animations etc) task state (not started, in process, complete etc) and can be configure to email folks when assets are checked in, available etc. In production studios tools like Tactics and Shotgun help provide the management infrastructure.
If you are working on your own depending on size of project, your level of organization etc they can either be overkill or very helpful. Personally / if I am hacking out a shader etc i wouldnt use one. If I am working on a multimonth project then i would.
re: AditiaPratama - I wonder how to integrate it with blender…
Aditia there is a general web UI you can use outside of Blender and there is a python interface for tool integration (Tactic is written in Python but its based on Python 2.x). There are some existing scripts for Maya on the Tactic forums and i think a Blender thread as well.
We are currently evaluating it (previously we had used Shotgun) and if it meets our needs we will probably look at a blender plugin, for checkin, out, status updates etc from within Blender.