Thanks for the detailed description of what you’re trying to do. While I can’t definitively say that Git is appropriate for your needs, I can at least answer your questions and point out what I think might be a further concern.

You are correct that Git operates at the level of a project, a “repository” in Git parlance. The repository is typically defined as a given directory and everything underneath it. There are exceptions to this though. One is that specific contents in the repository can be “ignored” by Git. In the case of a code project, the things that typically get ignored are files that are generated by tools from source files that are not ignored, also known as “tracked”. But you could use the ignore function in a different way. Additionally, through file system symlinks, you could keep the repository someplace else and explicitly link into the repository the files you want tracked. So at least this limitation is probably surmountable depending on how your workflow works.

Your understanding of how Git wants a human to tell it what to do is correct, but not the whole picture. Git is essentially designed as what I like to describe as a “workflow toolkit”. It is designed in this way to create a very unopinionated set of tools that can be used to support whatever kind of development workflow can be imagined. Unfortunately, this also makes using Git for the beginner extremely complex and difficult to get started with. But , this also means that it is designed to be composed into more opinionated and specialized workflows for whatever application can be imagined. Because of this, it is also designed to be automated by calling Git from other languages or tools, so I have the greatest confidence that a higher-level workflow could be built for your artists that made it much more simple to work with.

On the other hand, one limitation of Git is that it is designed to work primarily with text files, preferably smallish text files. It is much less efficient dealing with large files and especially so with large, binary files such as are often used in game development or possibly 3D animation work such as you’re describing. It’s specifically for this reason that Git LFS (LFS is an initialism for “Large File Storage”) was designed and built. So you may want to take a look at Git LFS and decide if it is appropriate for your needs, if indeed I am correct in assuming that your 3D animation work generates large binary assets rather than text files.

I hope that helps!