What is the best way to organize your model library and its textures?

[arnoudschoofs]

What is the best way to organize your model library and its textures?

 

This is how we work now but it seems that there should be an easier way:

 

We organized our server in a "projects", "model library" and a "texture library" part. ( see image attached )

 

When we work on a project we often modify a textures for a specific scene, to protect the original textures we copy them from the texture library to the project folder.

 

To keep our model library organized it has many subfolders. The scenes are always in a "scene" folder with there textures in a "texture" folder in the same subfolder.

 

When we reference an object from the model library we add its subfolder path to the user paths so max finds its textures.

However this is very cumbersome if you have many referenced files from different folders. Another hassle is that the user paths are stored locally so if the same render scene is opened on a different machine we need to relink all the user paths of the referenced files.

 

Another option is copying all the textures from the referenced files to the project folder but this results in many duplicate files on the server.

 

Is there a way so max finds the textures from all the referenced files? (we have more then 99 subfolders in our model library so adding the whole model library to the user paths is not an option...)

 

[notamondayfan]

When you modify a texture map, why not just re-save the map in your texture library? I.e if you have Concrete_Wall.jpg, when you modify it call it Concrete_Wall_02.jpg. That way you have a centralised system, and plus other members of your team can also see the file and re-use it easily, rather than looking though various project folders.

 

When you say you reference a model from the library, are you using xref objects (or similar)? My personal preference is to merge the models into the 3Ds Max scene from my library. Inside my library models the texture maps are all linked to the texture map drive, so not problems with file paths. If I improve the 3D model inside my scene, I'll then re-save it back to the library at the end of the project, so my model library is up to date.

 

Dean

[arnoudschoofs]

Thanks for the reply Dean.

 

We mostly use object refferences, this has been working OK so far.

Reorganizing our textures from the object library to the texture library is going to be a pain but it seems that its the only way to fix our problem and have a clear system for future projects, thanks for the suggestion!

 

Arnoud