How detailed do our naming conventions need to be professionally?

SummonedSpirit

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.

nathdevlin

Hi,

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.

Marshkin

As nathdevlin said, each studio will have their own conventions.
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  

Deathstick

At my previous job we used a consistent folder directory, along with using our initials when naming textures so we didn't all make Brick01.tga when working on the same project. Keeping a universal way of organizing things was pretty important as we'd be updating visual environments from 15+ years ago on some occasions, and all changes were checked out/in to TFS using visual studio. Basically everything was separated into a folder tree like meshes / textures / terrain / source data. Reusable textures we kept in their own texture folder for things that could be generically used on models. Unique textures mapped/baked specifically to a model though were kept in the same subfolder as the model itself for quick finding and copying over.

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.

Tekoppar

Something I've learned from programming is to name EVERYTHING. It's a pain in the ass to come back 4 months later trying to figure out what anything does, just spend a minute or two naming things.

Justin Meisse

Don't get cute and give things funny names, I once saw it cause an issue where a texture named a naughty word showed up in the game patch progress  which was an issue for an "E" rated game.

Deathstick

Heh, Reminds me of  which they later patched out of Kerbal Space Program apparently after someone found it and posted it on the forums.

NoRank

Substance painter baker relies on naming convention so yeah, pretty much everything is named properly.

SummonedSpirit

gotcha guys thanks for the insight!