Small studio
A shared asset library without a pipeline department
Between 'a folder on the NAS' and 'we deployed Perforce' there is a gap that most small studios live in permanently. What actually works in that gap, what reliably fails, and how to set it up so it survives contact with a busy month.
At this size the problem is not storage and it is not permissions — it is that nobody can see what the studio already owns. The fix is a shared folder plus a shared index, one agreed path on every machine, and one person who spends an hour a month deciding what gets promoted. That is genuinely most of it. The software is the cheap part.
Do you actually have this problem?
Worth checking before spending anything. If none of these are familiar, your folder structure is working and you should leave it alone.
- The same HDRI has been downloaded four times, to four different drives, under three different names.
- Somebody asks in chat whether we have a good scuffed metal, and the honest answer is "probably, somewhere".
- A scene renders grey on the second machine because the texture paths point at someone's Downloads folder.
- The shared drive has a folder called
_NEW, a folder calledFINAL_assets, and a folder calledz_old_DONT_USE. - New freelancers spend their first morning being told where things are, by someone who is only 70% sure.
The cost of this is not dramatic, which is why it never gets fixed. It is twenty minutes here and a re-download there, spread across everyone, invisible on any timesheet, and it compounds with every project you finish.
Five things studios try first
In rough order of how often I hear about them. None are stupid; each is a reasonable response that runs into a specific wall.
A shared network folder and good intentions
Necessary but not sufficient
WhyIt is free, everyone understands it, and it genuinely is the right foundation.
WallA folder is storage, not an index. Without previews and search, a 4 TB share is a place assets go to be forgotten. It degrades over time in direct proportion to how busy everyone is.
Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive sync
Wrong tool for large binaries
WhyAlready paid for, works off-site, handles versioning of a sort.
WallSyncing hundreds of gigabytes of textures to every workstation wastes disk on all of them, and sync clients are notorious for locking files mid-operation. Placeholder or online-only files break applications that expect a real path.
Perforce, Git LFS or similar version control
Correct at a larger scale, overkill here
WhyProper history, proper locking, industry-standard for game teams.
WallIt is a serious piece of infrastructure that needs someone to administer it. For a five-person team whose problem is "we cannot find the rock", the setup and maintenance cost dwarfs the benefit, and artists tend to route around it.
A full DAM or production tracker
Solving a different problem
WhyPermissions, approvals, metadata, reporting — everything procurement asks about.
WallPer-seat monthly pricing, an implementation project, and a feature set aimed at managing deliverables rather than browsing a texture library. You end up paying for approval workflows to solve a search problem.
A spreadsheet of what we own
Dies quietly
WhyZero cost, and it does technically work for a while.
WallIt is maintained by exactly one conscientious person, and it stops the week they get busy. Every studio has one of these, two years out of date, in a folder nobody opens.
Five steps that hold up
Three of these are organisational and cost nothing. Do those first, and you will know within a month whether the software part is even needed.
- Put the library somewhere permanent and boring. A NAS share or a server folder that will not be reorganised. Resist the urge to restructure it first — an indexed messy folder is more usable than a beautifully organised folder nobody has indexed.
- Agree one path, on every machine. Map the share to the same drive letter everywhere, or use the same UNC path everywhere. Pick one and enforce it. This single decision prevents the majority of "works on my machine" texture path failures, and it is far cheaper to make now than to retrofit.
- Put the shared database on the share. Kiosk Pro and Studio support a shared or network library, so the index and thumbnails live beside the assets rather than being rebuilt per workstation. One machine does the indexing pass; everyone else opens the result.
- Keep personal and shared libraries separate. Multiple databases means an artist can have their own scratch library alongside the studio one, and switch between them. This matters more than it sounds: if the only library is the shared one, people stop adding things to it because they do not want to pollute it.
- Give one person the curation role. Not a pipeline department — an hour a month. Someone decides what gets promoted into the shared library, and everything else stays personal. Tooling does not fix curation; it just makes curation cheap enough to actually happen.
What it costs
| Edition | Price | Covers | When it is the right one |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pro | €49 | 1 seat, lifetime 2.x | Teams of one or two. Includes the shared library feature, so two people on two Pro licences can share a network library perfectly well. |
| Studio | €129 | 3 seats, lifetime 2.x | Three people and up. Cheaper than three Pro licences, and a single invoice rather than three. |
No subscription, no renewal, no seat-audit server. For context, that is roughly the cost of one artist-hour — about how long a single "do we already have this?" conversation costs across a team of four.
There is no published volume tier, but there is a person on the other end of the email. Tell me the team size and we will agree something sensible — including a trial across a few machines before you commit, which for a studio purchase seems only fair.
Questions
How many seats does the Studio licence cover?
Three. It is the same feature set as Pro, licensed for three people instead of one, as a single one-time purchase of €129. For a team of two, two Pro licences cost less; from three people up, Studio is cheaper.
We are six people. What then?
Buy two Studio licences, or get in touch. There is no formal volume tier published, but I would rather agree something sensible with you directly than have you buy six separate copies. A short email reaches the person who decides, so we can agree something sensible for your team size.
Is it a subscription?
No. Pro and Studio are one-time purchases carrying a lifetime licence for the Kiosk 2.x line. There is no renewal, no seat audit and no phone-home requirement to keep working. A future 3.x line would be a separate purchase decision, made when it exists rather than promised now.
Does everyone need to be on the same network?
They need to be able to reach the same folder. That is usually a NAS or a file server over SMB, and it can be a VPN if your connection is fast enough, though browsing thumbnails over a slow VPN is an unpleasant experience. There is no cloud sync component — nothing is hosted for you, which is the point for studios that cannot put client assets on someone else's server.
Can two people write to the shared library at once?
Yes — everyone reads the same index, and anyone can add to it. Small teams usually settle on one person curating what gets promoted into the shared library while everyone else consumes it, which keeps the library coherent as well as avoiding collisions.
What happens if someone leaves?
Nothing technical. There is no seat management server to reassign, and the library is a folder you own on hardware you own. You reuse the licence key on the replacement machine.
Do you invoice, and can you handle EU VAT?
Sales go through Gumroad, which issues a proper invoice and handles EU VAT including reverse charge when you enter a valid VAT ID at checkout. If you need a purchase order, a specific invoice format, or a bank transfer instead of card, email me and we will sort it out.
Try the free edition on one machine first — it includes every DCC plugin, so you can judge the export behaviour before anyone spends anything. The shared network library is a Pro and Studio feature.
See pricing