ftrack Connect Blender 2.8 integration
This is one of the internal projects at Luna Digital that I’m most excited about right now: a proper ftrack integration for Blender 2.8. It’s still early days, but a v0.1.0 alpha is available on BitBucket that’s good enough to start kicking the tires on.
Before moving to ftrack, we spent years using other project management solutions that simply never fit the bill. Asana, Trello, Monday, Wrike, the list goes on. Don’t get me wrong — there were a lot of features we liked in each of them. But nothing gave us the power to custom-tailor our pipeline like ftrack does.
(For the record, they’re not paying me to say these things. I just genuinely love it. But that’s not what we’re here for.)
The biggest feature introduced in the v0.1.0 alpha is the concept of “working files”. Ftrack doesn’t really care about tracking files between publishes. Instead, it kind of expects you to open the file, make your changes, and push your file back to the ftrack server when you’re done. This workflow is fine for small, incremental changes, but time-intensive tasks like rigging or animation might require you to work over multiple sessions or multiple days.
It’s far from perfect, and there are still some outstanding bugs to work out, but it’s something Luna Digital desperately needs.
If you’re interested in trying it out for yourself, check out the source code at https://bitbucket.org/luna-digital/ftrack-connect-blender/src/master/. There isn’t a pre-built integration yet, but it’s easy enough to build on your own (check out the README for full instructions!). If you come across any bugs, just log them in the issues tracker and I’ll take a look!
