material file organization

[philvanderloo]

I'm trying to get my head wrapped around the best file hierarchy for material organization. As my libraries expand, I want to be able to locate all of the corresponding maps and textures without having to search through thousands of files.

I would also rather not have them on my C: drive but it seems like saving everything to an external hard drive on a network really is slowing things down.

Would anyone be willing to share their philosophies an/or file structure for material maintenance.

Thank You

[Scott Schroeder]

It's best to do this from day 1 of building up your library rather than somewhere in the middle of it. It can be a very boring and time consuming process to do this with a library of existing textures and materials that are poorly named.

 

Your first step is logical naming for your texture files such as "BRICK-RED.jpg" or "BRICK-(manufacturer)_RED.jpg" rather than "383843bdfd93434343.jpg". If you have a lot of files already that need to be reamed, you can do this in Bridge or Light Room pretty easily. It will take some time, but it's easy to do. Not only should you properly name the texture image, you should place it in a logical folder. Such as Bricks, Stone, Wood, etc. Don't get too deep in naming the folders/images, just keep it simple.

 

Once you have properly named texture files you can go about creating materials and putting them into logical materiel libraries such as Bricks, Concretes, Wall Paints, etc.

 

Finally you can use a tool to help find/organize your materials. Such as:

 

Connector - http://connecterapp.com/

SAL (Soulburn Asset Loader) -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edvfB7Tc-lU and http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_tools/scripts/3dsmax/soulburnscripts.htm

Material Presets Pro: http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/v-ray-material-presets-pro

Project Manager: http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/project-manager

 

And I'm sure there are quite a few other tools out there that can be found on ScriptSpot.