Why do you need to lock anything? To prevent someone else from working on it? To prevent duplicative work? That sounds like a management/coordination issue. Not a VCS issue. So you have version A and version B. Why are 2 artists working on the same asset without coordination? Do they not use task tracking or project management? Even if that’s ignored, then one person’s work gets wasted. That happens all the time in text based dev too if it’s lacking coordination.
Should coordination live in the VCS layer? That sounds like it creates more issues than prevents.
Should coordination live in the VCS layer? That sounds like it creates more issues than prevents.