Organizing your assets

[Krisztian Gulyas]

I started working at a studio as a texture artist, organizing the textures/materials is part of my job.

On my PC I dont have a lot of textures, so I never really thought about how to do this.

In the studio there's a folder for wood, concrete, brick etc, but there are probably a few thousand different textures. How should I organize that?

 

Should i create subfolders for wood planks, rough wood, fine wood etc, and same for the other textures as well, or is it better to have them all in one place, like here, just a folder named wood and that's that?

 

The other question is:

How to name the textures? I think it doesn't matter while you don't use them, but after I create a bump map and reflection map, how do you name those? OR do you use a project folder and copy every texture and asset you use in the scene there?

 

Never worked in a studio before and I was curious how you deal with your assets.

 

Thank you!

[Casey Hawley]

I think simpler is better. I am in a new studio myself and have been tasked with re-organizing the texture and model libraries. Unfortunately for me, whoever the admin was before split them up in all kinds of funky ways, so there are duplicates everywhere. It's a daunting task, but again.. simple is better. I put all wood in one folder, unless it is wood plank flooring, then it goes into Wood\Flooring. Some of how you separate categories will come down to personal preference. For example, I put Marble and Granite folders into a Stone folder, but I prefer to have Tile as its own folder.

 

For model set textures (e.g. Evermotion, CGAxis, XFrog, etc) I put all of those into a ModelsTex folder separated into folders within for each volume or set.

 

For 2D cutout imagery, my main folder is called Image Cells, then broken out roughly into People, Animals, Food, Lights, Landscaping, etc, so I only have to go to one folder to get at all of my compositing imagery.

 

As for naming, typically I name new textures for what they are, NOT what they go to (like a project name or number). And I always note what type of map it is with an abbreviation or word near the end of the name, like: bump, norm, spec, lum, ao, mask, refl, etc. I also put a number in the name to quickly distinguish variations. For example: 'white_oak_01', 'white_oak_01_bump', 'white_oak_02'. This way I will also see all of the related maps when sorting by name.

 

If I don't know, say, the type of wood (or stone etc), I just name it 'wood_xxx' where xxx is a unique number. I find that when I am in need of tex from the library, I am always going by the look, so specific names aren't that important. Of course, if you know the type, put it in the name to improve searches later.

[notamondayfan]

I personally keep the folder count and hierachy as simple as possible, and name all the maps properly so you can search if needed.

 

I also delete anything that isn't up to my quality, as at one time I ended up with my libray being full of crap textures, which I never used, but always had to trawl through.

[christosviskadourakis]

http://www.cggallery.com/tutorials/vray_optimization/

 

This is very imformative, it helped me to solve my problem. Give it some time and read it.

 

Cheers

Christos