How detailed do our naming conventions need to be professionally?
polycounter lvl 2
Hey guys,
I've always observed in 3d modelling and assets that minimally people name joints, materials, meshes and texture files. Like the picture above.
Is there anymore naming we need to do for our assets to be presentable for work? For example for materials and the textures connected. Do we need to rename the files or can we leave it as the default names suxch as file1, file,2, placetexture1, placetexture2. Or is it more efficient to just connect and hide since anything that is to be editted will be the texture file which is already named externally.
I've always observed in 3d modelling and assets that minimally people name joints, materials, meshes and texture files. Like the picture above.
Is there anymore naming we need to do for our assets to be presentable for work? For example for materials and the textures connected. Do we need to rename the files or can we leave it as the default names suxch as file1, file,2, placetexture1, placetexture2. Or is it more efficient to just connect and hide since anything that is to be editted will be the texture file which is already named externally.
Replies
Industry wide there's no particular standard naming convention. I for one like scenes that have been labelled / named appropriately. Each studio will define their own conventions. The benefit of following conventions and keeping scenes tidy in a studio environment means that if another artist has to pick up your work and or debug something it's a simpler process to work through and reduces wasted time picking through many "polysurface***" or "file**"
That's my two cents I prefer clean and organised scenes others may see this as a waste of time and prefer to get more art done than to maintain a clean file.
What is important is to get into the habit of setting a convention for yourself and sticking to it. Then you'll be able to adapt to whatever preferences the studio or customer may have.
Even if the customer does not have a preference, keeping your scenes consistent will prevent anyone who has to work with it in the future from cursing your name
I personally kept my own "folder mess" of textures being mixed/baked/edited. When it came time to finalize and check in however, I batch copied and renamed them over to the clean file structure. Win-Win? In the end it all comes down to if it's a bad file structure/renaming system from the beginning, good-freaking luck finding specific files a month to years down the line. Or when your mesh count in the library goes from 1 to hundreds. Clean in the beggining, easy to find at end. Messy in the beginning, a clusterfuck at the end.
Pretty sure it all depends on the file structure at the company you work for though, there's a reason people write in-house documents!
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Also you'd definitely want to rename joints/bones into something identifiable IMO. Otherwise I feel pity for the programmer that has to figure out that random jointnumber109 is the neckbone when he has to make the character's head turn towards a point of interest.