There is no convenient way with Blender to give just the one piece of a project to some day worker while withholding access to those parts that need not concern him, and which he should not have access to. That is inherent in the Blender database, which is a single file all neatly zipped up and without any mechanisms for password protection or other security.
You hire some monkey off the street to do a week’s worth of work for you and keep things on schedule while the artist who should be handling that piece is recovering from his appendectomy. You do not want that monkey to get his paws on anything other than the immediate task.
Maya’s approach of splitting the database among umpteen zillion different folders that can each be secured separately makes a lot of sense to a business that wants to stay in business. Your network administrator can put a password lock on all the textures, and another on all the lighting setups, etc. (Actually ACLs. Access Control Lists, would probably be used.) Your one-week wondermonkey won’t be able to get his paws on anything other than what you let him work on, and when he leaves to take a job with your competitor, he will not be able to carry any of your company’s proprietary secrets with him. And all this is done without impacting anyone else on the team. No artist needs to be involved; the security is done by the network technician.
The closest you could get to this in Blender is to have an artist prepare a special, limited .blend file every time you bring in a temp for some small piece of the project. You would also need an artist to merge the new work in with the main flow when the temp is done. These tasks have to be done by artists who understand Blender’s internals; the network technician would be of no use. Along with tying up precious artist resources with mundane admin work, it would be an error prone versioning nightmare. And it would not be long before its continuing costs were much greater than the cost of Adobe licenses.
Blender’s approach moves a lot of database management crap out of the way of the artist, which is A Really Great Thing To Do when the artist is working by himself, or in partnership with other trusted artists. It just does not scale to Big Studio productions where there are always dozens of artists working simultaneously on different parts of the project, and maybe thousands of artists who have touched the product at one time or another during its development.
this quote is from a slashdotthread a very informative one ,it also have a comment about a studio using it for Guns N’ Roses concert
We use commercial and open source software in my animation studio, money is not a huge problem if it helps to deliver a project on time. I'm the boss, I pick the software we buy, and the animators choose what they want to use. Blender is so fast for rigging and animation. Animation is a blast to do in Blender. Fast posing, no gimbal locks, fast keyframe repositioning, etc. Blender renders faster in Linux than in Windows, and is very stable. Something I can't say for other programs.
We just delivered 15 minutes of animation for a recent Guns N’ Roses concert in Las Vegas. We’re talking a lot of frames, at full HD resolution. As part of the videos. the band singer asked if we could please create and animate a white, hairy wolf, and we did it in two days (that was our time limit).
I have to aknowledge its akward interface. Even with the 2.5 tweaks it feels strange. I think this is the only major feature you can say may alienate new users.
A simple password-protection mechanism for blend files would be nice for Blender, though that’s not to compare to protecting actual assets inside of the blend files.
Hell, since proxies don’t work when linking between scenes within the same .blend, any complex character or vehicle is pretty much always going to be in a separate .blend.
And how exactly is having umpteen zillion folders is any different from Blender’s link/append mechanism? And how does this imply lack of protocol for committing all work to its proper storage? And… oh, darn it, I’ll just stop right there.
That is why you have a file system. For each user you can set read/write permissions for each directories. Also you create a group of users with certain privileges. In addition, you should back up a serious project at least once a day.
On the other hand, it seems Blender cannot easily recover from every corrupted file. So stack overflow attack is possible on x86.
In the spirit of Opens Source : If you think Blender is not secure then hire a programmer and explain him what to do (or more than one programmer) and code from Blender source what is needed! Then share to the world what you have made!
To be fair I read the thread quickly, but it seemed to me that he was the only guy banging that particular drum, several in the thread pointed out linking, and most disagreed with him.
I dont know why people believe this BS about computer security. I am just amazed . We see every single day hackers crack every possible security system and yet people still trying to find a secure way to protect their data.
Well I am sorry to burst their bubble but there has not and there will never be one. At best all you can do is make it harder for someone to access your data. But if you really want to keep data secured , you dont use a computer and especially a computer that is hooked to any kind of network. I am sure his so called “secured” Maya way of protecting data would take a minute to a security coder to hack.
I also dont see why one cannot hire a developer to encrypt blender data.
Wow. The author of that sounds like an ass. If these “wondermonkeys” knew they were being referred to in such a derogatory manner, I’d hope they’d refuse to work under such disrespectful, authoritarian regimes.
Regarding the concerns voiced, I would THINK they’d be using contracts specifying what can be used or altered and how. And if they’re NOT going to trust someone who signs such a contract, they probably shouldn’t be working with that someone in the first place.
Sounds like a graphics/animation-mill run by pricks.
People talking about contracts are missing the point, why take a risk and expose assets unneccesarily. Its standard practice for network admins to give access only to what is needed, regardless of contracts etc. Basically, why take risks?
That said, on any reasonable sized project, the assets should be spread across multiple files anyway (and linked as people have said). Having one big file I might add also makes collaboration a real pain as well.
That said, since blend files are essentially archives, it would probably be nice to have a “save as folder” option that just saves the blend data as an un-archived folder.
This is the sort of post I usually ignore but come on, this post quotes some comments from a thread in a slashdot post announcing blender 2.65. The Slashdot comments quoted are from a person who:
a) is not familiar with pipelines or processes from studios or companies who use 3d animation software or contract out use of same
b) is not familiar with Maya
c) is not familiar with Blender
