SVN and Helga access

Helga

Signing In

You will need a username and password

If you just received a username your password is blank. Go immediately to the 'MyHelga' tab, and create a password for yourself you can remember.

What it is

Helga is a project management/Asset management tool. On the front end, it looks like a webpage with lists of shots and models in the project. Each shot/model has a preview image, and a short 'blog' where you can put in comments.

Helga also knows who is working on a project, here you can be assigned to work on the shot/model. As you work, post comments in the Shot or Model, with a preview image or movie as an attachment. This makes it easy for the directors to reply with corrections/comments, and let you know when the work is final.

Helga sends email to you on assignments, and lets you know in general how things are going.

In short

For most of us, it acts like a blog or flickr, with each shot having it's own page where you can comment/upload preview images or videos. When you are working on your assigned task and need feedback, upload a comment with a preview, and the feedback will come in the same thread.

SVN (Subversion)

Repository and Working Copy

SVN is what is known as a Version Control System; it can take a collection of files and save them on a server (this is called the repository).

Multiple people can Check out the files on their own machines (these are called working copies).

Updating and Committing

Let's say Liz modifies the file 'train.blend' in the working copy. In order for Henri to work with her changes, she has to make them available to everybody - so she does what is called a commit . After the commit, the file is now on the repository but not on everybody's working copy.

Henri now has to run an update on his working copy. This will get the version of the file that Liz changed, and he can now use her changes.

Clients

To work with SVN you need a special program installed on your computer. There are many of them, and they are all called svn clients. Some common ones are:

svn command line client (From a terminal in any OS) packages
rapidsvn (linux)
tortoise svn (windows) Downloads
svnX Download(Mac)

Instructions for the SVN terminal client

To do the initial checkout , run:

svn checkout PROJECTURL

To update a file:

svn update FILEPATH

To update a directory: svn update

(if you are in the top directory of the project it will update all the files in the project)

To commit a file:

svn commit FILEPATH

If you type:

svn commit

It will commit all things in the current directory.

Adding New Files

If a file does not exist and you create it, you need to do an extra step before you can type svn commit. This is svn add which tells svn you are adding the new file: svn add FILEPATH

followed by: svn commit

file structure

Once you have checked out SVN, you have a bunch of files! a quick overview of directory structure follows:

scenes

Contains all the shots of the movie!

act_1

Shots for act_1, typically one blend file per shot, a1sxx.blend (where xx is the shot number)

act_2

Same as act_1, but with a2sxx.blend files.

act_3

Same, but here a3sxx.blend

edits

Contains reel.blend, a live edit that links all the shots.

lib

Contains files that get linked into the scenes (usually as groups), also contains Python scripts, textures, etc. etc.

models

Here's the meat! All our assets live here, except some really specific things that can just live in their own shots. We categorize so that the number of files in each folder is not so big...

chars

rigged characters such as gilgamesh and the roaches, crowd characters, etc.

vehicles

Trains live here