



Some recurrants, yesterday. The Blender Institute has continued its fruit-themed codenaming with Redcurrant, its upcoming open-source asset manager. Image: Redcurrants by Vicky Brock (Creative Commons).

The Blender Institute has announced Redcurrant, a new lightweight asset-management system being developed as part of Project Gooseberry, its attempt to create feature-length animations using only open-source tools.

So what is Redcurrant?

Pitched somewhere in the gap between SVN and Dropbox and commercial systems like Shotgun, Redcurrant is intended to “manage assets, provide centralized team communications and streamline workflow”.

In practice, that seems to mean version management, notes, an integrated player for reviewing movie files, and support for both offline and cloud-based workflow.

It’s interesting to note that the Institute has chosen to develop a new tool rather than make use of an existing asset manager like Southpaw Technology’s recently open-sourced Tactic.

Tactic has more of a pedigree in product design than animation, but we suspect the issue may be its EPL licence, which offers weaker copyleft provisions than the GPL licence used by Blender.

Send in your feedback

Redcurrant is still in the early stages of development, and the Institute is now soliciting feedback from the Blender community over its core functionality.

According to a post on the Project Gooseberry blog: “Designing this tool has proven to be a difficult task, with each artist having different ideas of what’s relevant for such a tool.”

“We have now taken a step back and created a set of ‘high level requirements’. We want to check these within the Blender community before creating more detailed specifications.”

Anyone interested in contributing can leave feedback in the comments for the blog thread below.

Read more about Recurrant on the Project Gooseberry blog

Read the high-level requirements for Redcurrant

Tags: animate feature, asset management, Blender Foundation, Blender Institute, cloud-based, free, open source, Redcurrant, shot review, Shotgun, Tactic