Improvements to the Asset Tracker

[pokoy]

The Asset Tracker is our only place to manage assets. Currently, it lacks a number of features to make managing assets easier and more convenient for users.

Some obvious shortcomings are (I've never used Vault so sorry if I miss something here):

- Asset status currently knows these states only:  'OK', 'Found','File Missing' for local paths, and 'Network Path' for assets located on network paths. While the information for local paths is good enough, there's no state for a missing asset on a network path. Whether or not an asset on the network is missing, the status will always be 'Network Path'. This needs to be improved, a 'Network Path - File Missing' status needs to be introduced.
- Sorting is currently only possible for assets names, there's no way currently to sort by asset paths. This makes redirecting paths very cumbersome for huge scenes. Please let us sort by paths and status, too.
- asset icons are greyed out for missing assets. In some cases, the difference between a normal 'healthy' icon state and the greyed out state is very difficult to see. Please introduce a new icon for missing assets, preferably the original icon with a red cross or anything else that is well visible for the user.

Additional feature requests:

- Please let us display assets for selected objects only. Currently we have no way to quickly display assets used on selected objects only.
- Please add a 'Search and Replace' feature for paths. This would make it easy to quickly redirect whole scenes without having to manually change each and every unique asset path in the scene.
- Please introduce a 'file type' column to the list. Sometimes, scenes need to be made production ready by making sure certain file types (such as Jpegs) aren't used because of quality issues. Sorting by file type would help us managing scenes in such a case.
- Please add a 'Collect' feature to quickly collect all scene assets in one place. I know that we have a 'Resource Collector' utility but it needs to be moved to the Asset Tracker IMO as it's the main place managing assets. This would also help to clean the UI and make it more accessible to new users.

[mark_kauffman]

In the meantime, take a look at the Pixamoon scripts, specifically Library Tracking and Bitmap Tracking. Much of the functionality you listed is in these. So, it is possible with the existing Maxscript system. That being the case, I would like to see this functionality implemented at the core for speed. 

[chopmeister]

Just to add to this already excellent suggestion:

1. A modern asset tracker should be able to sort and search by any and all included categories. 

2. It should offer some statistics as well, since it is the ideal place to do so (think total texture size in the scene, total size of geo proxies etc, total number of objects using given asset perhaps, and so on.)

3. UNDO. Pretty please. Accidentally pressing 'Remove Missing Assets' (which is really easy to do) is seriously destructive.

4. Right now, the tracker just collects things from the scene. It would be very nice to have it work both ways instead. Selecting nodes which use a specific asset, for example.  

5. Any and all new features accessible via maxscript.  

and 6. make it work -faster-   🙂

That'd be my two cents. 

[mg]

A MILLION TIME YES!!!  The current Asset Tracker is extremely limited and frustrating to use for all the reasons outlined in your post.  There's no logical reason that the different columns of a spreadsheet should not allow sorting and each value isn't editable directly.  I also agree that the "network path" catch all is too vague and can allow missing maps to be overlooks and not flagged.  I'd love to see more time spent on these kinds of things vs yet another upgrade to Chamfer.  Haha!

[Anonymous]

asset tracking is very lagy when changing asset paths in large files ( you would press right click and it freeze for a while until the dialog appears then freeze again when you make path changes ) and that repeats over every asset i need to change ,very time consuming i suggest to disable realtime automatic update maybe and replace it with a refresh button or only when exiting asset tracking dialog to update all changes once or just fix the lag

Also when project paths are mapped to a server folder and i add any file to that folder max freeze for a moment then continue as if asset paths are always on check

Thats very consuming background processing going on