Hey! So, I'am researching a way to manage materials and textures for my team. I want something to pre-visualize all materials and the texture that compose those materials. The idea is to avoid, for exemple, duplicated textures/materials. Imagine that I have a group of people that is working on a city, how can I assure that…
I'm actually interested in this as well. I'm guessing without some sort of repository, it's just really good and strict naming conventions. I know from some presentations, it seems like a couple of studios have stored/tested materials in their editor, which may be another option, but probably not the fastest method if you…
In our studio, we manage this with a directory structure and naming convention. Materials are stored in specific folders, textures in another. We re-use a ton because we're performance-limited on mobile, and we also want to limit the download size.
So, when you want to texture something, you first go there and see what already exist? If you want a brick wall for exemple, you search for the name ? Is there any way to preview the material ? To see how the normal map behave of stuff like this.
What 3d modeling software do you use? I know people have developed plugins for Max or Maya that catalog materials and scenes by making screenshots. Worth a look, just to see how others solved this. Just one example of many... http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/project-manager
We use Unity. It's very easy to drag a material into the scene and drop it on any mesh. Good naming means it's not hard to find things. But we don't have a ton of bitmaps either. If we had more I would look into a thumbnail / tagging system. XnView has a nice setup for this. But in-engine is better. Unity also has a…