Clustta 101

A 5-minute crash course. By the end of this page, you'll understand the entire mental model and be ready to start using Clustta on a real project.

The vocabulary

Five words cover 90% of what you'll do in Clustta:

Term	What it is	Real-world equivalent
Project	A self-contained .clst file with all your work and history	A repo, or a folder you'd zip up and send
Collection	A container that holds assets and other collections	A folder
Asset	An individual file under version control	A .blend, .psd, .mp4, etc.
Checkpoint	A saved snapshot of an asset at a point in time	A "Save As v2" - but smarter
Studio	A team-level container of users and projects	An organization

That's it. Everything else builds on these.

The two modes

Clustta runs in one of two modes depending on which studio you're in:

• Personal studio - Always available. Perfect for solo work or trying things out. Projects stay on your machine, with optional ClusttaCloud™ sync for backup or collaboration with other indie artists.
• Online studio - A team studio with a server (self-hosted or ClusttaCloud™). Adds collaborators, roles, sharing, and sync.

You can have access to both at once and switch between them with the dropdown at the top of the app.

The flow

Here's a complete day in Clustta, end to end.

1. Open or clone a project

• Personal: Click New Project, give it a name, pick a working folder. Done. You can also turn an existing folder into a project by clicking the + on an untracked folder in the browser.
• Online: A teammate (or you) creates the project on the server. You download it, picking where on your disk the working folder should live.

The working folder is just a regular folder. You can browse it in Finder/Explorer like anything else. Open files in Blender, Photoshop, your text editor - whatever.

2. Add or edit files

You can get files into a project two ways:

• Drop files into the working folder in your native file browser. Clustta will detect them and mark them as Untracked.
• Use an Asset Template from inside Clustta. Clustta creates the file for you using a template the studio has set up (e.g. a base .blend with the studio's render settings).

Edit those files normally - save in Blender, save in Photoshop. Clustta watches the working folder and notices anything that changed.

3. Create a checkpoint

When you've reached a sensible save point - a milestone, end of a session, before a risky experiment - create a checkpoint.

A checkpoint records:

• A descriptive comment ("blocking pass complete")
• An optional preview image
• Who made it and when
• Only the chunks that changed since the last checkpoint

Because of chunked storage, a checkpoint of a 2 GB scene where you tweaked one mesh might only be a few MB on disk. You can checkpoint as often as you want.

4. (Online studios & ClusttaCloud™ personal projects) Sync

Checkpoints are local until you sync. When you press Sync (or Ctrl+S), Clustta uploads your new checkpoints to the studio server (or, for ClusttaCloud™ personal projects, to your account). Collaborators - or your other machines - can then pull them down.

If someone else has changed something you also changed, Clustta surfaces it as a conflict with two clear options:

• Rename - Keep your local version under a new name; their version becomes canonical.
• Merge - Stack your local checkpoints on top of theirs. Nothing is lost.

There's no auto-merge. Your work never gets silently overwritten.

5. Hand off to a teammate

To give someone else access to an asset, assign it to them. They'll see it on their end and can checkpoint it (only the assignee can create checkpoints - that's the soft lock).

If the asset has dependencies (e.g. a shot that depends on a character rig and three textures), the assignee automatically gets the whole graph. No need to manually share each piece.

6. Track it on the board

Switch to the Kanban view to see assets grouped by status (Todo, WIP, WFA, Retake, Done). Drag cards between columns to update status. Your producers will love this.

What makes it different

A few things you might not be used to:

• No "save" button in Clustta itself. You save in your DCC tool. Clustta watches the file.
• No branches. Single ownership + assignment makes them unnecessary for this kind of work.
• No staging area. Modified files are detected automatically; you just decide when to checkpoint.
• Selective sync. You only download the assets assigned to you (plus anything in collections marked as Shared, which everyone can see). You're not dragging down 500 GB of project history just to fix one shot.
• Soft delete. Deleted things go to Trash and can be recovered until you actively purge.

Where to go from here

• Install the desktop app
• Create your first project
• Set up a studio for your team
• Self-host the studio server
• Browse features for deep dives on each capability