Introducing: Private Projects
- 3 May 2016
- 3 min read
Blender Cloud members can now create personal private projects here on the cloud!
What is a project?
A project is a collection of files, assets, comments and general data of your own Film, Game, VR project. It could also be a simple collection of textures or shaders.
How to create a project
Simply visit cloud.blender.org/p . On this page you will see a list of your existing projects and you will be able to create a new one by clicking on the New Project button.
Once you have clicked New Project, you will see an interface that allows you to edit it, where you have to specify a description and summary (these fields will become optional in the future). You can also set a header and thumbnail preview for your project.
How to add files to a project
After updating your project settings, you can go Back to my project and start adding folders and assets. To do so, click on the New button in the header and choose Folder or Asset. After clicking, you will see a form where the asset can be edited. For example you can provide a picture preview, as well as a file item.
Note: the reason why assets and files are not a single entity is to provide more advanced functionality in the future. We understand that right now it might feel redundant and we are working to make it more transparent.
Please let us know in the comments or at cloudsupport@blender.org if you encounter any problem or if you have any questions!
Technical details
Here are some more technical notes about the implementation of projects and assets.
A project has a number of attributes that can be set via the user interface:
- Name
- Summary
- Description
- Picture Header (optional)
- Picture Square (optional)
More attributes will be available in the future (sharing settings, node types).
What are nodes (and node types)?
Well, thank you for asking! Nodes are all the items that can be found in a project. Everything is a node: a file, a folder, a comment. They are defined with custom properties and accordingly presented to you. We plan to add support for new node types in the future (such as textures), allowing you to view and treat new items in a meaningful way.
Assets
An asset can be any file. Depending on their type (image, video or anything else) they are displayed in a specific way in the interface. The basic properties of an asset are:
- Name
- Description (optional)
- Picture (a preview of the asset, optional)
- File (the file itself)
- Status
Folders
Folders are a way to organize your asset. You can create as many nested folders as you want. The basic properties of a folder are:
- Name
- Description (optional)
- Picture (a preview of the asset, optional)
- Status
Coming soon
In the near future we will work on expanding the type of items that can be uploaded on the project, as well as providing you access to some of them directly in Blender! You can check out a more complete planning (asset versioning, Attract, etc.) here.
Limitations
This is a beta release and there are currently a number of limitations in the service.
- maximum storage quota per user is 10GB
- video files are not encoded, they are simply stored as files and they are served as they are
- file sharing with other users is not possible, but will be added soon
We are excited to make these new features available to our subscribers, and we hope this will help to push the Blender Cloud project to the next level. More is coming!
22 comments
if there was a way to use it as a file management system on a computer, do you think that could the short space disk problem ?
Ei guys this spae is so cool to have are you plan to do some improvments or a more conected way to add assets from blender directly? Having this connected to a version control and to the production track service would be magnific!
How can I download a Project from the "Own Projects" page? I cannot see any button!!
How can I change the picture size form the image added to asset subject. I see a big black square with my smaller image inside.
I have a project that is 100 GB. Anyway we can increase storage space or allow other user to pool their storage quota together?
@Thomas Cheng: We can definitely look into this, I'll send you a private message!
Does this sync my local project files to the cloud project or do I have to upload manually? If so I cant seem to find the documentation on how to achieve this.
@neiljo26: Uploading to a project is done manually at the moment, more like a presentation of your project. We are working on SVN integration for keeping your working files in the Cloud.
@Pablo Vázquez: I know this is an old thread, but you might want to look into Syncthing. It's an open-source software that can sync files and folders between machines. It supports both clients with read-write access, and clients with read-only access, so would seem ideal for an open project. It uses bit torrent like technology, so bandwidth is distributed between all the clients and no central server is needed.
Is there a version of this that we could install in our local server? I mean, a lot of our projects take 1Tb of space, so we would prefer to use local storage and management, can this be done?
@Juan Gea Rodriguez: Currently we are focusing on providing the best experience for Blender Cloud subscribers. All the software is available on developer.blender.org, so you can definitely get the infrastructure up and running on premise.
@Francesco Siddi: Great, and what about the posibiltiy of acquiring more space in the cloud? I prefer local storage because of costs of course, but for some projects may be ok to have them in the cloud.
Thanks!
I think this is brilliant! Thank you, perfect for collaboration!
Super useful, thanks. You might consider linking associated Addons on the page where a new project is created. In the Menu?
Do you have version control planned? Would be especially handy in shared productions. Also, will Blender be working as the syncing application? Just wondering how you plan to have users access these assets? My main thinking here is that there will be production files that can't be opened by Blender (pdf, doc, xls). Also, there will often be team members on a production that don't know how or don't need to use Blender (producer, director etc). Will it be easy enough for them to access files on the Blender Cloud, or would you suggest using Dropbox/BitTorrent Sync in tandem with the Blender Cloud for non blender specific files?
Sorry about the mass of questions, just very excited by this feature of the Blender Cloud :)
@stephen thomas: good and important question, this platform is very exciting, and I am looking forward to whatever it can provide. I'm sure that the blender institute doesn't want to give the community anything less than awesome.
This looks very promising indeed. I especially like the plans for the future; the file/asset differentiation and treating every asset as a node. Nice work!
Joyed that this is available for portability reasons. I kno'it is developing, but GREAT start.
Wow! Looks great an very intuitive! Just a couple of things:
1- It would be great if there was a note regarding the size/ratio of the Header pictures. I asume it's the same as the headers in the Cloud 2- Is working the Featured Assets? You can mark assets as Featured and you even see a success message but there isn't any featured asset in the project's main page actually.
Thanks! Very excited for this!
But why? I mean, it's great. But what is the goal for this?
@PabloVazquez: So the ultimate goal is to have something similar to Autodesk Shotgun but in an open fashion, right? That is VERY cool.
Cheers!
@Jonatan Mercado: Blender Cloud's ultimate goal is to be an open production platform, were you're able to create and manage your own film/game/freelance projects (same way we make our own movies!). That's a good question for the podcast, we'll reply it further there tomorrow Thursday!
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