So we've hit a wall. We've been doing in-house mocap for about two years now and have accumulated somewhere north of 3,000 clips. At the start I thought a flat folder structure with descriptive names would be fine, walk_forward_slow_01.fbx, that kind of thing. Reader, it was not fine.
The problem isn't just naming. It's that different people on the team have wildly different mental models of what a clip "is." A rigger searching for "idle" and an animator searching for "idle" will expect completely different things. We've got duplicates, near-duplicates, clips that were captured for one project and repurposed for three others with no record of it, and takes that someone marked good but actually have a frame of T-pose right in the middle.
We looked at some dedicated asset management tools, Rumba, ftrack, a couple of others, but the licensing costs are hard to justify when we're a team of eight. Right now I'm leaning toward building something lightweight on top of our existing Shotgrid setup, tagging clips with a controlled vocabulary (action type, intensity, actor ID, session date, project association) and storing a small thumbnail preview alongside each one.
A few specific things I'd love input on:
How granular should tags actually be? I worry about over-tagging to the point where nobody bothers, but under-tagging defeats the purpose.
Has anyone built or found a decent preview thumbnail workflow for FBX clips without going through a full DCC every time?
How do you handle versioning when a clip gets cleaned up or re-exported, do you treat it as a new asset or replace in place?
We're a games studio primarily, if that context matters. Happy to share what we land on once we figure it out.
Three thousand clips and a flat folder, yeah that's a special kind of pain. We went through something similar. The biggest unlock for us was accepting that the taxonomy has to be built with the animators, not handed down to them. Top-down controlled vocab that nobody helped design just gets ignored inside of a month.
For thumbnail previews we ended up writing a small Blender headless script that batch imports FBX, scrubs to frame 15 or so, and renders a turntable frame. Runs overnight on a spare machine. Not elegant but it works and doesn't require anyone to babysit it. I can dig up the script if you want.
Versioning question is hard and I don't think there's a universal answer. We treat cleaned clips as new assets with a parent reference back to the original take, so walk_fwd_slow_01_clean.fbx knows it came from walk_fwd_slow_01_raw.fbx. Replace-in-place sounds tempting but you will absolutely have a situation six months later where someone needs the original and it's gone. Keep both, link them, and let disk space be cheap.