What Is Helix DAM
On behalf of the product and engineering teams at Perforce, I am pleased to announce the official release of Helix Digital Asset Management, or Helix DAM for short. Helix DAM is the newest addition to the Digital Creation & Planning Suite. It is purpose-built to help teams capitalize on and secure their creative digital assets.
Helix DAM Overview
Helix DAM is a new web-based UI layer built on top of Helix Core, our scalable versioning engine, that streamlines and secures the process of storing, finding, using, repurposing, reviewing, and sharing creative assets.
During the Beta, Helix DAM did this for 2D image files (such as textures and concept art), but with this release, we now also support 3D models (with and without textures), audio, and video files. You can see the full list of supported file types in our documentation.
I will give you a description of some of the key features of Helix DAM and how it works below, but first I would like to talk about why we built this tool and what problems we hope it will solve our users.
Why Did We Build Helix DAM?
We built Helix DAM for a couple of key reasons.
Reason One: Art Runs the World Now
The first reason: more and more of what people use or buy is becoming digital. Not only is it becoming digital, but consumers are demanding a higher level of polish or realism in the items they interact with digitally. And because of the pandemic, companies are turning to digital means to position their goods in the best light.
In short, the world wants more & better digital experiences, so we have seen a boom in the number of artists and designers collaborating with technical teams.
Reason Two: To Unite Teams
Second, the convergence of these two types of teams has naturally created some conflict. Teams needed a way to accommodate each other’s workflows while keeping assets secure. We often heard from our users that the creative teams found version control intimidating and needed it to be more invisible or in the background of their workflow to help keep all their assets in one place.
We have designed Helix DAM to help ease the collaboration between these two teams.
The idea behind the product is simple. Help Helix Core users:
- Maximize the use of their creative assets — stop recreating everything from scratch because it is too hard to locate.
- Streamline the review process — stop the chaos of reviewing creative assets over email or Dropbox.
- Save money — Reduce storage costs by having all assets in your single source of truth and saving your team time by easing collaboration.
- Secure their creative intellectual property — keep assets in a secure location from creation to delivery.
How Does Helix DAM Work?
Helix DAM offers a visual, web-based UI that provides teams with access to any of the creative assets in their available projects. A thumbnail preview of the asset, regardless of type, will automatically be generated and displayed within the UI. This gives team members a preview of the asset before pulling it down into a project.
What about security and our existing protections?
Helix DAM respects your current file security and protection setup. When you create a new project, we simply add them for you. Rest assured that you do not need to recreate your security protections.
What about existing artists and designers who already use Helix Core?
If your existing users would like to use Helix DAM, you can easily purchase our Helix DAM add-on license to give those users access to the power of this tool.
Can we deploy this on-prem or even in the cloud?
Both deployment methods are fully supported, giving customers the flexibility to select the deployment that works best for them.
What Value Do Teams Get from Helix DAM?
Helix Core is a leading tool in game development, but on its own lacks features specifically for artists and designers. We designed and built Helix DAM from the ground up with one single vision: to simplify the way artists and designers interact with a version control system.
Helix DAM offers tremendous value to high-velocity creative teams in the following ways:
- Searching and finding existing assets is a key feature that Helix DAM gives its users. You can search using many different criteria, including tags, filename, project, collections, and many more.
- You can preview 3D models from a web browser.
- Having the ability to organize and arrange your assets by project and collections means that you create an easy-to-use, project-based structure, while enabling you to invite both internal and external users to contribute while you remain in full control of who can access what.
- Give artists and designers an extremely straightforward way to upload and review assets they are working on with simple drag and drop upload or even using our Helix Sync app to scan local content and upload changes as needed. No more workspace creation needed as Helix Sync does it all for you automatically.
- Make it easy to review and comment on assets, as you work with others to review your content directly on our web-based image annotate and comment functionality.
- Everything is delivered via an easy-to-use web UI with no need to install complex desktop applications.
Get Started with Helix DAM — Today
We can’t wait to hear what you think about Helix DAM. Try it free for 14 days, no set up, configuration, or commitment required.
