Textures - How do you organise them all?

zbrush_newbie

Over the years i`ve accumalated a texture library with thousands of files (jpegs,tifs,tgas,etc) and was wondering how everyone else catalogues them all, anyone use any special software for doing it? or do you have named directories like i have eg brick, stone, water,etc

Just thinking whether its worth using a tagging software to find things easier as i`m always hunting around for things.

Thanks

[HP]

The only thing I can tell you is, don't over-organize your stuff, funnly enough It's harder to find stuff that way.

I just have it organized by materials, metal, dirt, grundge, etc. and dump them on there, when I need to look for one I turn on big thumbnails and scroll away.

SirCalalot

I should probably organise mine better before its gets too big.

Starting with Assets I then break that into Man-Made and Natural, then I break that into folders based on Meshes/Props containing all the texture and object files for the mesh in there.

Mark Dygert

Naming conventions instead of folders.

Ground_Organic_GravelA_dif.tga
Ground_ManMade_PavementB_dif.tga
Ground_ManMade_Concrete_spec.tga
Metal_DiamondPlateC.tga
Skin_SnakeF_dif.tga
Brick_PaversC_dif.tga

When I'm working I'll pull textures from all over, then move them to a textures folder inside the project I'm working on. To do that I archive the scene which gathers all the textures into a zip, extract the textures. Then re-path all of the textures using File> Asset tracking inside of 3dsmax.

Joshua Stubbles

Yep, we keep all textures in one folder for a given UE3 package. Files have simple name conventions like
AcidSpill_D (diffuse)
AcidSpill_N (normal)
AcidSpill_S (spec)
AcidSpill_R (reflection mask)
AcidSpill_RGB (for channel useage, ie; red=spec green=reflective mask blue=gloss)

Over-organizing can slow things down. Keep it simple.

Stromberg90

I sort them by folder (metal, ground, wood, plastic, stone) and so on, not the most advanced system but it works(at times)

I agree with [HP] I find that when I try to be really neat and organized I end up not finding what I am looking for, and also creating more folders when I find something that doesn't fit completely with the folder name :P

Mark: That's a great tip, never knew about that

mLichy

Joshua Stubbles wrote: »

Yep, we keep all textures in one folder for a given UE3 package. Files have simple name conventions like
AcidSpill_D (diffuse)
AcidSpill_N (normal)
AcidSpill_S (spec)
AcidSpill_R (reflection mask)
AcidSpill_RGB (for channel useage, ie; red=spec green=reflective mask blue=gloss)

Over-organizing can slow things down. Keep it simple.

Yeah, this is how I've usually dealt with it. Either, textures named this way in each asset folder, or all in 1 folder.

SirCalalot

I usually label a texture like the following:

T_Maple_Leaf_COLOR_alpha

The 'T' at the beginning is so my packages in the UDK Content Browser have all the Textures grouped together. Then it is followed by the texture name, the RGB channel in caps (COLOR / SPEC / NORMAL etc.) and the alpha channel in lower case (alpha / occ / disp etc.)

tekmatic

These are all cool ideas. I am in the process of trying to organize my collection but I wonder if the renaming of all the files I have will be so time consuming that maybe dumping them into labeled folders will be easier.

As for the naming of the textures to be used in projects, I like SirCalalot's method!

odd_enough

For source textures (primarily photographic), I keep them in specific categories, very similar to the structure of cgtextures.com, but the inclusion of a "Tiled" folder in each category, for textures that I have manually tiled, or downloaded pre-tiled. I don't change file names from their downloaded names.

When creating asset textures, I keep them within the asset's folder with naming convention of asset_name_D, _N, _S, _E, and asset_name_Rspec_Gemissive_Bgloss (for bitpacks), and lump them all into a single texture subcategory in UDK

zbrush_newbie

Thanks for the responses. Some are suggesting naming conventions i wasnt actually asking about that. Its more about speeding up finding suitable textures in my vast texture collection ie an old brick texture,etc

i`m thinking more about cataloging my textures. I found lightroom does a pretty good job as you can also tag quickly lots of textures. The down side is it doesnt seem to support a great deal of file formats. Just wondering if there are any other better programs out there.

passerby

for my photo references i just organize in folders by fairly rough categorys, metal, wood, grunge etc.

and for my materials, i work on all the needed maps in 1 PSD using layer groups, than got a script that exports out all my root level layer groups as separate tga's, while appending the group name to the filename