Staying Organized: File Naming Conventions

jocose

We all know it's important to stay organized especially when your working on an entire environment and have many files to deal with.

I'm curious what kind of naming conventions and folder structures you guys are using.

For example, if I have a model of a house that has 4 unique textures associated with it how do you go about naming those files so they correspond with your house model?

Also do you guys usually break up your scenes into multiple files or do you try to keep everything in one scene?

Any other trips or tricks related to staying organized and keeping an art pipeline coherent would be appreciated as well

|*BILLY$CLINT*|

The following is the kind of naming convention that I use when going into a project.

For the names of the meshes I would use the following:

Folder assets came form_What assets is_Iteration number

H_Roof_00

For the names of the textures I would use the following:

Folder assets came form_What it goes on_Type of texture_Iteration number

H_Roof_D_00 D= Diffuse
H_Roof_S_00 S= Specular
H_Roof_N_00 N= Normal


Folders Setup- So what I would do is setup a folder called house on my desktop. Then inside of that folder I would make more folders for my mesh and textures or whatever else I needed.

-House(Main Folder)

-Mesh
-Source Files
-Exports

-Texture
-Source Files
-Exports

As for the names of the actually assets I break the mesh parts down into the three following sections.

House_Building - This would be for any of the meshes that make up the building like the walls, foundation, and roof.

House_Arch - This would be for your doors and windows, stair, and whatever else you might find on a house that is not crucial for its structure to stay intact.

House_Props - This is for all the crap that you might find in someones house. From the fridge down to a dresser full of underwear any small props and whatnot.

Inside of each of these folders I would have another folder that has all the final textures that are associated with the meshes that are in the folder. So for example inside the props folder there would be another folder that was labeled textures and inside that folder is all the textures that are associated with those meshes.

As for how I keep my meshes either together or split up really depends on what the mesh is used for and how big the mesh is. For example if I had a table with say 5 beer cans on it I would export out 3 version of the mesh.

One with everything
One with just the table
One with just the cans

This way you have every combo you need in the package already to go, but this does have a down side to it and that is, this method will bloat your package size as you will have meshes that you don't needed use taking up space. For a solution to this I would recommend exporting all assets as single objects build your level and then go through your level looking at what groups of individual assets you could turn into one single asset inside your 3D modeling package.

sprunghunt

It's more important that there is a naming convention than what it acutally is. Unbelievably I've worked with people who didn't use one.

Something like what billysClint suggested is pretty similar to what I do. However I usually try to avoid having too many subfolders and put all the textures and mesh files for one asset in the same folder. You can always sort by type if you want to tell the difference between file types. If you have to click more than 4 times to get to a file then your folders are probably too complex.

I will also append the size of the modular chunk to the end of a objects name. EG: CER_pillar_512 would be 512 high and CER_trim_256 would be 256 units long. It saves on problems with calling things 'double' or 'triple' and makes it much easier to find what you want when you're making stuff.

jocose

DKK wrote: »

I'm Pretty sure this thread already exists.

I checked, briefly, and couldn't find anything. If one does exist please post it here