However at this stage I have no experience or even tried to install it yet. So it could work great, could be just as problematic as Kitsu or somewhere in-between. And of course it’s possible that it may also not really have the tools one actually needs.
At the moment and as my project is still fairly small, I’m not really using anything. As time goes on, assets start to mount up and I (hopefully) get to the point of full shots and sequences, that may well become a problem.
But so far, my folder and file naming structure (as detailed in my recent videos) is serving me well.
Kitsu remain the best open source solution I know off, for a small studio working on long projects that can make sense to use it.
You can use shotgun if you feel limited with Kitsu, I guess it’s better for a bigger studio/project.
I don’t know how other software like Ftrack work with blender. Could be interesting to look into it.
I tried Tactic once but it’s probably getting a bit old.
For a small team / small project, you should really ask yourself if it’s worth the energy. In these cases having a google doc can be good enough.
You’ll have to spend a good part of your resources into connecting blender to the project manager.
For a big team / project this is getting mandatory, for a small team / project it’s a lot of energy.
And it’s much less needed in the end.
In average it can take a year to have these tools really working in a studio, and in general it get better after 2/3 years of development .
Yes it’s something a bit different, it allows to view each asset and each shots all together.
But it doesn’t allow (yet ? ) to make comments, assign tasks to artist, track time / money, or do some asset casting for a shot / sequence.
But on a small project you can get away without it. In a small team , even if it’s possible to use a project tracker to make reviews, the team is small enough so you can just review the project with artist and let them take the notes , it’s much faster that way. You can also keep track of the budget by hand.
On a big team/ project this isn’t possible anymore, but still a google doc can work very well in many cases.
Watchtower is a web application that can fetch data from a live Kitsu web API or from JSON files, allowing it to be used in a production environment with user authentication (Kitsu server), or integrated with other task management software via JSON data interchange.
I’m willing to bet the Studio is totally using Kitsu to feed Watchtower all the info it needs to basically display where the film is currently at.
I think that’s where I got to with Kitsu, along with the possible view that all the actual file data ends up being half stored in two places (the main project folder and whatever you store/manage using Kitsu) or the whole lot just ends up stored under and managed by Kitsu.
For a ‘one man’ band, it just didn’t seem worth it, on top of having to hack around inside Kitsu to just make it all work and hope like hell the next update doesn’t break it all.
So yeah, there’s a good chance I’m going to end up just using a ‘spreadsheet’.
Still, it was worth a look and try, even if it did take up a bit of time initially. You don’t know till you try. I likely should do a short Production Diary about Kitsu, it was part of the initial process and it can be just as important to detail what didn’t work.
I just managed to get it working on blender 3.2.0
Main setup is windows PC connecting to Kitsu on a linux server.
Will play with it and see how it progresses I think it is nice tool to see how much I spend on a project and how far it has advanced from the storyboard till finished film
Cool ! Yes indeed it’s super interesting to look into it and it can at least give a glimpse of some good practice, or how things work at a bigger scale.
On big projects you might want to have a great part of the pipeline managed by software like kitsu or shotgun. On a small project than can make sense to do the opposite and use different small tools for different small tasks. Things like tasks, time and budget tracking you can do them very differently when you’re 1/4 people compared to 20.
What is left ? maybe a tool that automate shot creation ? path management so you automated where shot are saved and rendered ?
Then maybe asset loading, a way to define what asset goes into which shot / sequence.
Maybe batch rendering some shots, some little automation. But at the end of the day, even if you end up doing these things manually how many time will it save you on your project ? especially because you’re alone so the time to develop these tools takes longer to balance many operations you would do by hand.
But it can help organize things better at least .
It’s interesting to do basic maths, like how many time it takes to build your pipeline. And how much time it saves you per day.
Then you can do the same math with a team of 10 people, for everyone, saving 20mn per day it’s already 200mn per day , all that across the whole production, then it get much more important to have at least one people taking care of the pipeline and tasks automation.
I was interested in pipeline and how it works toegther so implementing it in my short film will give a nice idea on how it all works in practice My pipeline will ofcourse differ from big stuidos out there as I am only one artist plus one guy doing sound
Right now my backend is ready with kitsu and the plugin is working in blender I am very excited to see how it goes
Well that’s good news. Be interesting to hear how it all goes.
Yeah, no doubt once production scale goes up the potential time savings can out way the setup and maintenance time.
My other thought was always to just use it for general tracking, but not use the plugin to actually push/pull assets in and out of Krita.
That may still be an option, especially once I get to the point of putting shots together, even if it’s not some what automated.
Then of course the plug-in may get more work and changes on it to make for a smoother process. Mind you, it seems it hasn’t had any real updates for a few months.
Thank you a lot for the detailed report of your Kitsu adventure! I read your post only now, sorry for the late reply.
I’m sad you ended up not using it but it’s natural since Kitsu is there to improve collaboration more than anything else.
Kitsu particularly shines for TV series production, feature films, and, more generally productions involving persons that are not in the same room. Most of the time it’s used for productions with a lot of pictures to ship and many people involved.
It still works pretty well for small productions because it clarifies everything for everyone and makes the validation easier. Instead of messing up with tons of emails, you have every feedback and delivery clearly stored and tracked. In the end, you improve the quality of your production and sleep better (especially if you have to report to some third parties).
It works well even for tiny productions. We used it for reviewing the new illustrations of our website and it made my life much easier (3 characters 10 illustrations). We were only 3 people using it.
For file management, you can look at Ayon (formerly OpenPype) and Prism2. They both offer integration with Kitsu.
For your information, for any assistance, you can connect to our community Discord. People will be glad to help you.
Thank you again for using Kitsu and showing everyone how you were able to set it up on your Windows workstation!
It’s possible that I may still revisit Kitsu and use it for something, just at this stage I’ve mostly been so focused on one character, from model, then texture, then rigging and now early stages of testing the rig, which then in turn now means getting to grips with Blenders animation system. As such, not really felt the need to mess around with Kitsu again.
That could all change once I really get to the point of a few characters, layouts, animation, compositing, rendering, etc across a few shots.
Or it’s possible I may just be over complicating things for a single person, since as you say, Kitsu is more a collaborative/multi-person tool and I may find that a good folder/file structure and a spreadsheet is all I need.
I do feel that maybe if the Blender add-on was more easily adjusted or documented for overall storage system and how that relates to checking things in and out via Kitsu, that it could maybe all be more useful. Not that the Blender add-on is your problem.
Then, if combined with that one actually set-up a ‘proper server’ for Kitsu and all the data storage, then things may work a lot better. But again, likely over complicating things for a single person. Why have multiple PC’s running when I can just store it all on the PC I’m using for Blender and track using a spreadsheet.
Still, it’s at least interesting to look at all this stuff and thanks for making the full source code of the application available to play around with.
I have been following this thread and decided that I could pop up and say that for my project, Kitsu is totally a life saver. I have been working on Project Widow for a LONG time and it has gone from Blender 2.49 all the way to now Blender 2.93 and has had a lot of side projects to keep it running. From shader editor modifications, to file syncing, as a group effort we did a lot of coding to get Project Widow off the ground. Back in 2010 we had access to a free instance of Shotgun (now Shotgrid), but we really did not understand how to use it fully I guess but either way Project Widow went into dormancy for some time so when I rebooted the short film a few years back I was stuck on how to manage this project effectively. Up until I found Kitsu I was using basic tools to keep track of what shot was in what stage, a lot of it was just me opening up files and figuring it out from there. Not effective at all.
I found Kitsu somehow and installed / configured it on a spare system I have. Since then I have not looked back and it has saved me a bit of work in a sense that I no longer have to guess what I am doing anymore. Yes I wish I had some collaborators again (Project Widow started as a tech demo involving several people from around the world), it does work for solo projects at the scale I am working on.
This short has like 40 shots at least and to keep track of what stage each shot is in would and has been a nightmare without the handy server running Kitsu.
As for the Blender addon I think I finally figured out at least the playblast portion of it, which OMG is so nice to have now that I got that working right. Hopefully I don’t eat up to much of my hard drive space because of it but then again I make a mental note to not upload a new version each time I make a small change, only big changes that are very obvious so that I don’t waste precious HD space for each video.
One thing I haven’t done yet is work with Assets in Kitsu, mainly because of the amount of work involved, all the “assets” had been done since 2009 and while I could simplify it I guess, there is no need to at this stage of production. My main goal was to track the shots I have already been working on prior and the ones that I have yet to work on. In that area Kitsu has shined!
As I haven’t changed much configuration the Kitsu install is pretty vanilla I guess. The only thing that I really make use of right now is the Blender Kitsu addon which saves a few clicks to upload a playblast.
Did you have any troubles getting that addon to work? A couple of us had problems getting login to work and even if one got past that, file paths, etc seem to be hardcoded for the Blender Studio.
Only regarding the Assets, I have a set filepath system in use for Project Widow and changing that this late in the game would require a lot of work to re-link assets to their respective scene files. Also as I have been busy trying to get this done I haven’t experimented with that aspect much in other projects but I attribute that to just laziness I guess lol.
In the Preferences of the Kitsu addon, once I got the filepaths for the playblasts set to a specific directory, I had no problem uploading playblast videos to the correct sequence / shot. This was of course after I had already set the sequences and shots in Kitsu, as I have been working on this short film for a long time it was tedious but easy to establish this. I do have errors every once in a while when I do a playblast, it doesn’t crash per se but once it gets done rendering the playblast sometimes I get an error that it failed, so I simply try again and usually it works just fine afterwards.
I do have a very recent build of the addon, I did notice that the addon had been updated since the last time I downloaded it many months ago, it did seem to function better? I did not have issues logging in but then again I am the only user for this project so I can’t say if other users logging in would cause problems, I would like to think no theoretically, otherwise the Blender Studio really wouldn’t use such a tool.
That is of course just my experience, yours may vary of course.
Ahh, ok, sounds like a bit of a difference between Assets and playblast’s, I only tried the Assets.
I think in the end if one used the full admin kitsu user then the addon would login in fine, it was only more restricted users that had problems. But if there’s only you and only one login, then I guess one wouldn’t have any issues.
Possible that is different/fixed by now, been a bit of time since I last tried.
Hi there!
just stumbled upon this post while I was researching on ways to implement kitsu on my university projects pipeline (Im a teacher of 3d animation on a public uni here in my city), I have been able to run and connect to kitsu on docker while conserving dtata on every time I turn on the container in my pc (im running it on my pc because im don’t have other pc to act as a server).
i come here with some questions to learn if there’s better ways to implement its usage.
Does it store “.blend” files?
is there any way to streamline the flow of the files?
like 5 or 6 students have to be able to work on different files (like characters, props or enviroments) simultaneosly while those files need to have it’s textures available while being available for linking in to a different file (like a layout file) for the next part of the process. I know in the blender studio they use SVN but i havent been able to find any kind of guide.
Does somebody know where on my pc does Docker archives the files I upload?
Any help will be… helpful(?
(sorry for the english errors, I don’t usually speak it.)
I’m quite new to Kitsu ( I use it at work but I didn’t install it) so take what I say with a grain of salt.
I think you can attach files in your comments, but I don’t think it’s designed to handle file management and versioning. It’s a database where you store information not files.
Hum, what you ask is unclear, but it’s probably not something Kitsu will do.
Blender comes with the linking and override system, so you can link a character in a shot, and keep working on the master file, and the changes will propagate.
If you decide to make a new version of the character a script is needed to update the character in the shots. It’s not something kitsu will do.
You can look at https://openpype.io/ to create the link between blender and kitsu if you don’t want to code that yourself.
Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions!
Any info that I could get is extremly valuable to me.
guess that its primary usage is to know what to do and whats ready, i can work with that.
thanks for clearing that, i dont have the knowledge to even find out about that (had been stuck since two weeks ago)
if clearig helps, i have been looking for a way to sync a buch of files (blender files, textures, etc.) between multiple computers to let more people work on the same scene for example:
a person does the character, someone else does the rigging, someone does the enviroment, other one links those two in a separate file which has a copy that actualizes where someone else works by animating the character. All that using linked files so that when one in the chain does a change the others can see it. (there is a BCON conference where i got that idea: the one about the pipeline of spring )
I’ll look into openPYPE, it seems very useful.
again, thank you so much, you are saving me lots of life.
I think it is nice tool to see how much I spend on a project and how far it has advanced from the storyboard till finished film 