How to Manage Materials/textures for a team?

GlowingPotato

Hey!

So, I'am researching a way to manage materials and textures for my team. 
I want something to pre-visualize all materials and the texture that compose those materials.

The idea is to avoid, for exemple, duplicated textures/materials.
Imagine that I have a group of people that is working on a city, how can I assure that they can access any material that other artist have made in the past? So the project won't have duplicated textures resulting in a waste of memory.

I was thinking about a material repository, that artist can search for materials/textures using TAGS, being able to reuse materials that is already in the game.

Is there something like this already ? How big studios manage something like this ?

leleuxart

I'm actually interested in this as well.  

I'm guessing without some sort of repository, it's just really good and strict naming conventions. I know from some presentations, it seems like a couple of studios have stored/tested materials in their editor, which may be another option, but probably not the fastest method if you just want to see if a material is already created.

Eric Chadwick

In our studio, we manage this with a directory structure and naming convention. Materials are stored in specific folders, textures in another. We re-use a ton because we're performance-limited on mobile, and we also want to limit the download size.

GlowingPotato

Eric Chadwick said:

In our studio, we manage this with a directory structure and naming convention. Materials are stored in specific folders, textures in another. We re-use a ton because we're performance-limited on mobile, and we also want to limit the download size.

So, when you want to texture something, you first go there and see what already exist? If you want a brick wall for exemple, you search for the name ?
Is there any way to preview the material ? To see how the normal map behave of stuff like this.

Eric Chadwick

We use Unity. It's very easy to drag a material into the scene and drop it on any mesh. Good naming means it's not hard to find things. 

But we don't have a ton of bitmaps either. If we had more I would look into a thumbnail / tagging system. XnView has a nice setup for this. But in-engine is better. Unity also has a tagging system.

What engine are you using? I would look into what organizational tools it has.

GlowingPotato

Eric Chadwick said:

We use Unity. It's very easy to drag a material into the scene and drop it on any mesh. Good naming means it's not hard to find things. 

But we don't have a ton of bitmaps either. If we had more I would look into a thumbnail / tagging system. XnView has a nice setup for this. But in-engine is better. Unity also has a tagging system.

What engine are you using? I would look into what organizational tools it has.

That's the thing, we have our own proprietary engine. We are still developing tools and etc. So I'am searching for a third party tool. Or, if the case, to develop one.

Eric Chadwick

What 3d modeling software do you use? I know people have developed plugins for Max or Maya that catalog materials and scenes by making screenshots. Worth a look, just to see how others solved this.

Just one example of many...
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/project-manager

Eric Chadwick

Some browsers for 3ds Max:
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/tags/browser

Some for Maya:
http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/search?search=browse&x=0&y=0

GlowingPotato

Hey Eric, Thanks for those links.

Indeed those assets manages look useful, This one looks promising http://store.cgfront.com/slib-plug-ins/11-slib-browser-maya.html
I'll try this one.

Thanks.

EDIT: well, it does not work with maya 2016. =/

GlowingPotato

I'am trying to find a standalone material library management with a PBS viewer, but no luck so far. 

Eric Chadwick

PBS?

bugo

He probably meant PBR, but PBS works too (Phisical Based Shader?) 
At our studio we built our own tools with scripts to suffice the shaderfx pipeline. It works wonders.

You may need a tool/script person to do that for ya.

GlowingPotato

bugo said:

He probably meant PBR, but PBS works too (Phisical Based Shader?) 
At our studio we built our own tools with scripts to suffice the shaderfx pipeline. It works wonders.

You may need a tool/script person to do that for ya.

Yeah PBS, i don't need the entire rendering preview to be physical based, only the shader.

@BUGO
I think you are right... Need someone to help me out here. Thanks for your input.

0xffff

Shading is only half the story yo, you'll get best results by using physical lighting aswell.

GlowingPotato

0xffff said:

Shading is only half the story yo, you'll get best results by using physical lighting aswell.

For previewing the material, a complex shader is not needed.

0xffff

I disagree, but hey it's your call.

2bytes

Why not Marmoset and a shader ball? It can be viewed in the browser...so with a little bit of html...and you have a library.