Assets

[glorybound]

I am having a major issue. I open older projects and the Cosmos models I used are no longer in the Cosmos library, so all my proxies and textures are missing. Are you changing naming and/or removing things on each release? Apparently my archive script isn't moving Cosmos assets to my project folder.

[Joelaff]

This is why assets as a service is silly. Things will get removed, just like movies on Netflix.

Got to copy everything into the project folder and archive it. Annoying.

[glorybound]

Yeah, I do, but for some reasons those didn't come over.

[dlparisi]

This is why assets as a service is silly. Things will get removed, just like movies on Netflix.

Aren't any used textures or models downloaded locally automatically? Granted, they may not sure up in three companies browser if chaos removes them but any scene I have that uses them should render just fine. Am I not understanding this correctly?

[Joelaff]

They are downloaded, but you need to manually transfer them into your scene folder and archive them with your project if you want to assure future availability.

I would not leave them in a directory controlled by Cosmo or any other online service. They could be removed, or at the very least lost if you do not back them up yourself, your drive fails, and they become no longer available for download.

Nothing wrong with stock assets so long as you control them yourself locally and back them up with your project.

[dlparisi]

Gotcha. I don't archive individual projects so maybe that's why I don't see a concern. I regularly back up everything (scenes, textures, models, renderings, correspondence, etc) to one local and one off site server so I'm never in danger of having anything unavailable. As long as the assets aren't subscription based where I can't use them if I don't have a current subscription I'm good. I see your point though.

[Joelaff]

I see. So long as your backups are snapshot based you are fine. If it is just a backup of the current state at the time of the backup then any file removed from your machine would be removed from the backup as well.

Snapshot based backups where you can access files from multiple points in time also help protect against ransom ware.

[dlparisi]

Yep, snapshots. On Retrospect 18 currently and have several backups of every file ever on my systems.

[dlparisi]

Getting way off topic here but my main concern with backups is not restoring old projects or being able to render them years after completion (it has happened though where a projects returns after a few years) but down time on current projects. I dread ever having to tell a client all the work we've done for a few weeks or months is irretrievably lost for some reason and I'll need to start over or revert to something from weeks ago rather than yesterday's backup.

Also, mechanical hard drives are cheap for backup storage so I've never sweated backing up everything.

[Joelaff]

Ah, Retrospect! I used that for years with floppies, then Syquests, then tapes. It was always reliable.

Nowadays it is ZFS snapshots hourly, replicated to local redundant file server every two hours and remote every six.

Yes, drives == cheap. Data == expensive!

[dlparisi]

Ahh, ZFS snapshots, forgot about those. Retrospect calls them snapshots as well although they are different thing altogether. Haven't gone ZFS (yet) - currently running unraid so I can add individual drives as needed (I don't think I can do that with zfs without adding another duplicate pool).

[fixeighted]

Sorry? So you're saying that Chaos has not only access to, but control over updating/deletion assets from folders on 'my' hard drive on an arbitrary basis?
That can't possibly be the case but if so I'd quite like it to be confirmed one way or the other by a developer please.

[glorybound]

Yes, all the people I had in my scene were gone, because Chaos removed them from the library. I have noticed recently that I'll get a message saying that I am using removed assets and it load them for me again.

[dlparisi]

Sorry? So you're saying that Chaos has not only access to, but control over updating/deletion assets from folders on 'my' hard drive on an arbitrary basis?
That can't possibly be the case but if so I'd quite like it to be confirmed one way or the other by a developer please.

Yeah, that sounds crazy. Bobby's anecdote though doesn't bode well but he also mentioned that he was opening older archived projects that didn't have the Cosmos assets archived as well. We need confirmation on this.

[glorybound]

I use a script to move all assets to my project folder, on every project. The Cosmos assets didn't move with everything else.