a few questions/suggestions from playing with prism for half an hour

#1 · 16. April 2019, 10:24

Hello, I just installed Prism to see how it would work and I have some questions/suggestions, i hope you don't mind me posting them!

1. Why is there a ""save version'" and save comment"? that is a bit confusing and in my experience doesn't make much sense to save a version WITHOUT comment. Even if you are 1 single individual working on your own, adding comments is always a good thing as sometimes you may not remember what you changed in the scene. And working in teams is ALWAYS recommended to use comments. In fact where I work you can't save if you don't add a comment when saving files.

2. If you have a scene opened in 3ds max ( i havent tried in maya just yet) and this scene is not in the prism pipeline, and by mistake you click on "create empty file", max will just create a new file without saving what you have in the scene at that moment. That's a bit dangerous...

3. When creating "steps"in the project browser, if you create new steps that are not listed in the ones by default, is there a way to save those new steps for a later use, when creating more assets for other projects etc, or you need to create them always manually? If that's the case, it would be great to be able to personalize the steps and save them in an ini or config file that you can edit.

4.Same as number 3, but for folder structures. Create your own personalized folder structures per each project can be a pain in the ass and be prone to errors but if we could create a personalized setup and save it for future use would be great.

Thanks for listening and looking forward to know what you think, cheers!

Alex

#2 · 17. April 2019, 0:19

Hey Alex,

thanks for the feedback.

Yeah it's a good habit to always save a comment to your scenes. But to be honest I use the save version button more often than the save comment button. I'd like to quickly save a version with a single click before I do some potential undoable operations and I use the save comment mostly when I handoff a scene to other artists or when a milestone is completed. I think this is just personal preference. I other people also think this is not needed let me know. For now if you want to remove that button in your Prism version, I can tell you which few lines of code you have to delete to do that.
I just tested it in max 2018 and 2019.3 and in both I got the "Save changes?" popup when I wanted to create an empty scene with Prism. If that's not showing it's definitely a bug (maybe in max).
If you create custom steps with the "Add new" button, the steps will be saved for later use already. You can open the "Create steps" dialog for another asset and you will see your custom step in the list. If you open the "Create steps" dialog for the same asset again only steps are listed, which doesn't exist already. All steps are saved in a config in your Prism project: \00_Pipeline\pipeline.ini. You can modify this in a text editor if you like.
That's definitely a useful feature and it got requested many times already. It is in the feature request list: [0055] Until this is implemented the best way is probably to create an empty Prism project, create all folders you need and use that as a preset. You can create a copy of that folder manually and open that copied project with Prism instead of using the "Create Project" dialog.