Been a while since I posted… 
Anyways, ya know how you hate it when Zbrush eats a model, or you want to go back in time, and throw away your work because it just isn’t working?
Yeah, it’s nice that there are some plugins that can save sequential files, but these can start to take up a lot of space.
Subversion is a pain, and slow with large binaries. But at work, I’ve started using Git for my java code, and at home, I decided to throw my ztools, objs, stls and moi files at it.
First off, I had about 1.25Mb files, once I checked them into a git repo, the size was shrunk down to 500mb. Git stores versions as differences, and compresses them further. The size of a ‘checkout’ is the size of the files before storage. but If I wanted to back up my work, I’d just need to ensure that everything is checked in, and backup the .git directory, which is a lot smaller.
It’s very easy to branch in git. So if I want to tweak a file, and possibly throw it away, I create a branch, and then work on the file in that branch. If I like it, I can merge it back into my main ‘master’ branch.
If I want to save my progress in Zbrush, I just save the file, and then check it in. Git comes with very powerful history tools. So if you make lots of little commits, it’s possible to collapse the changes down into logically saner chunks. You can be quick-n-dirty, and then clean up your mess.
And you can get even fancier. Git is decentralized, so you can publish and pull from other people’s repos. There is no way to ‘lock’ a file in git though, but you can create a seperate branch to track others, and then work out whose changes ‘matter’.
If there is enough interest, I’ll type up a tutorial. Git is somewhat linux centric, but it has windows support through MinGW. Mercurial is similar, and works natively on windows, but I know git better.
