Compression on mesh variations
To save data, we could save mesh variations as diffs / deltas in our project.
cons¶
- limited to ASCII
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can’t think of many realistic uses
- different UVs. but usually same meshes reuse same UVs.
- small mesh variations. sphere with 100k verts and only a few different verts. can’t see this happening in practice.
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it might work if someone duplicates a mesh a few times in the project.
e.g. outsource studios duplicate a mesh, so they can independently change it without screwing another studio over. It’s hacky but happens.
Example
- Unity & Unreal projects often contain mesh variations, leading to duplicate data.
- These duplicate meshes are also likely to be duplicated on the perforce repo
Saving deltas¶
Example
A 100mb mesh variation, where only the UV is different. It’s wasteful to have two 100mb file instead of just 1.
git only saves the changes between 2 textfiles, instead of saving 2 full textfiles
A file reference with override capabilities can handle this, but runs into issues if the original file changes.
Git solves this by never changing the original file in the git history.
Only Maya has support for this, Unity, unreal, and blender don’t. See dcc referencing comparison
similar tech¶
- USD (Pixar’s Universal Scene Description): Supports layered editing, where changes (position, material, etc.) are stored as deltas in layers — very similar to what you’re proposing.
- Delta Mush / Delta Blendshape: Not file diffs, but examples of storing deltas for deformation
ideas¶
what if we add a manager build on git
- by default history of ASCII files doesn’t show in the asset browser.
- a file revision can be tagged as a separate file, so it shows in our browser
- git can have branches for variations, but this might get messy with many branches?
history just points to a commit - Artist won’t be able to have both variants open on their pc at same time. Unless the asset manager somehow pulls only the file (git sparse-checkout or git archive) the artist wants, to a new temp repo?
Perforce saves files, not diffs. So this won’t work in perforce