Your pipeline flowchart has entities that have properties, including fields for storing data values. These fields need to be configured to match fields in your Digital Asset Manager (DAM). This is how the DAM data is synchronized with the entities in SimpleCloud.


However, SimpleCloud is not a DAM, and so only needs those data fields that are essential to the success of your workflow. For example, if you have an animation discipline with a camera shot that needs the time start and end range, the "cut in" and "cut out" data properties are essential. The shot cannot be completed without that information. And so you have to map that data from your DAM to SimpleCloud by creating those fields for the "shot" entity.


Your DAM is likely to contain many more fields, and not all of those are necessary in SimpleCloud. So when you are adding properties to your entities in SimpleCloud, it is important that you understand the details of your work flow and what components are needed for each task. With this information, you can then judge which data fields need to be included for each entity, and which ones are not useful in SimpleCloud.


To set the entity data fields:


  1. Log in as a studio owner or administrator. From the Dashboard, select the project you want to view to display its Resources. Then select Pipeline in the header menu to display the pipeline flowchart.

    If a pipeline has not been set up for the project, you are shown the pipeline creation page instead. You can use that to create a pipeline.
    SimpleCloud animation pipeline flowchart

  2. On the pipeline flowchart, select an entity (or add a new one) and then look in the Entity Type Properties sidebar. It shows the property settings for the selected entity, its fields, and its status types.

    Entity is selected, its properties are shown in the side bar

  3. On the Fields tab, select the plus + button to add a new data field. SimpleCloud displays an Insert new entry dialog.



  4. Enter the details for the new field:
    • Code - Enter the unique identifier for the field, as defined in your DAM. 
    • Name - Enter the name of the field. This 
    • Type - Set the type of value that the field will store (integer for numeric, string for text).
    • Default - Set the value that will be used by default, if no other value is provided for the field.
  5. Select Insert.
  6. Repeat this process to add all of the data fields you need for each entity.



  • What is always mandatory to synchronize is the entity identifier. In some DAMs it is a name and in others it is a number. In case it is a name, when synchronized, simplecloud converts it into a unique and human readable code. It transforms uppercase to lowercase, removes symbols and converts spaces to underscores. For example "My new Chäracter 45" would be "my_new_character_45". This is done to avoid errors in 3d software like Maya, which only accept ascii alphanumeric names without spaces.

    As an addition, I personally always prefer non-numeric identifiers for entities, since it is much easier to identify those entities in a directory structure of publications, work or metadata packages.

    It is also advisable to synchronize the numeric id of the DAM, in order to make the relationship between the entities in Simplecloud and the DAM.