Collaboration on scene graph based 3D data

Professional 3D digital content creation tools, like Alias Maya or discreet 3ds max, offer only limited support for a team of artists to work on a 3D model collaboratively. We present a scene graph repository system that enables fine-grained collaboration on scenes built using standard 3D DCC tools by applying the concept of collaborative versions to a general attributed scene graph. Artists can work on the same scene in parallel without locking out each other. The artists' changes to a scene are regularly merged to ensure that all artists can see each others progress and collaborate on current data. We introduce the concept of indirect changes and indirect conflicts to systematically inspect the effects that collaborative changes have on a scene. Inspecting indirect conflicts helps maintaining scene consistency by systematically looking for inconsistencies at the right places.