Hi gang! So, I've spent the last evenings reading the code and API and documentation of various pipelines, gathering inspiration for rebuilding my own pipeline from scratch.
Half because I have some very specific ideas of what I want my pipeline to do, but also as a learning experience, to graduate past my hard-coded pipelines and code.
Avalon is pushing a lot of the right buttons for me, and by far the most enjoyable to study. The structure makes sense, and is very similar to what I hope my intuition would eventually lead me to with a few more years experience :p
And the documentation is also just fantastic.
So I'm considering to drop my ego and build upon Avalon instead, which makes the most sense in terms of quality, support, time and money.
But I'm wondering, how doable would it be to make it work without MongoDB?
I have a very small team, often consisting mostly of myself, or up to 15 other people. Some remote.
So I had imagined the pipeline being portable and require minimum infrastructure to assist whatever artists I'm working with.
Does Avalon make sense to me? Or do I need to bite the bullet and setup a server to run mongo 24/7?
Hello @kstrandli, good to hear you're enjoying it!
But I'm wondering, how doable would it be to make it work without MongoDB?
Possibly, there's nothing inherently dependent on Mongo itself, only that the data being passed around are dictionaries which Mongo does a good job hosting in a way it can be queried with reasonable performance.
As for setting up a server 24/7, it could just be your own machine, with a port open for others to access it. It could be more complicated, you could host it on AWS or rent a physical server off of Hetzner. And long-term you probably would. But getting started needn't be more complicated than that.
@davidlatwe is working on a file-based alternative to the standard Mongo, with the same API. We had a look at building our demos on that a while back, but it wasn't quite ready yet. It's possible, maybe even likely, that it's ready now (ping David!). If so, you could avoid the server, and host the data in a file alongside your assets. You'd still want access from other machines to it though, so it deosn't necessarily change the need for infrastructure. But a file might be easier to grok and maintain?
The main reason you want a centralised server though, and why you probably want to bite that bullet, is because the data is centralised. You want to publish somewhere central, you want to load assets somewhere central. The only reasonable and common alternative that I know of is to do what game studios do and use Perforce. But it's got its own problems, with locking and merging of assets.
model
or a rig
, and then those are called whenever the artists tries to publish a model or a rig.
As long as you can be sure that no one allowed to modify those published files in Dropbox
If you could somehow publish file to the dropbox sync folder, and change the file sharing rules ?