Best Way To Organize Textures In Lightroom Classic
Hello everyone. This is a multi-part question. The gist of the question is, what software do you use to organize and preview your textures, what tagging/naming conventions do you use, and how do you organize these files into categories and hierarchies to allow you to quickly find the perfect texture for the job.
The reason for the question is, I'm just getting back into game dev and I've amassed a massive collection of textural assets most of which have some degree of organization, but are not optimal for searching in Lightroom. Most of the textures are organized in folders each from different texture collection CD-ROMs(Arroway-Stone, Artbeats-City,etc.)
Personally I've arrived at using Lightroom Classic for the job. I've decided to organize each texture collection into their own collections and have other themed collections such as Sci-Fi, Horror, etc. as well as stylistic themes for example Cyber Punk, Liminal Space, etc. Then using tags to tag the textural attributes for example wood, steel, etc.
Really, I don't know what I should organize into to catalogues, what texture aspects should be tags, and how I should build a hierarchy of tag groups in a way that would make everything easy to tag.
Any Ideas? Thanks.
P.S. This is my first time back to Polycount since 2002, forgive me!
Replies
Welcome back! I found it a pita to organize texture libraries, and I ended up not really using those assets as much as I thought I would, after all.
I think the key thing is to get better at generating your own high quality textures which are made specifically for the need.
But still it’s good to have a small library of frequently used bits and bobs like grunges, fingerprints, scratches, etc. to reuse as layers.
Anyhow, for tagging you could look to existing libraries for their taxonomies… textures.com comes to mind.
Thanks. Sorry for the delayed response, and I was starting to arrive at the same conclusion prior to reading your post. Organizing and tagging all those libraries seems like it would be a nightmare. For that reason I've started to get into designing procedurally generated textures, right now I'm trying to learn substance designer for textures and VFX. I also since discovered that Adobe bridge would probably be better anyway, as it seems more lightweight and better suited for that purpose.