Organizational system of everything

[PixelJockey]

Last year, after years of dealing with a cobbled together file system, I decided reorganize all of my digital resource files into a better semblance of order. Since I work in an architectural office so I ended up using the CSI MasterFormat 2004 system.

http://www.csinet.org/s_csi/docs/9400/9361.pdf

It seemed to make sense at the time, as most of my resouces deal with stuff in the building industry. But over time I have found that there is so much stuff that doesn't quite fit into the MasterFormat system. Now I'm ending up with a another cobbled together system.

So I'm wondering if any of you have discovered the Rosetta Stone of organizational systems. The penultimate organization system that can clearly organize everything in the known universe that is no more than four folders deep. Anyone.

[Dynedain]

Yes.

The round filing bin.

[tricky]

The eternal question me thinks.

We too have similar issues in our office. We've been going about 8 years or so, and when we started out, 'order' was a very rude word. We just put things we needed for a project wherever we felt. In fact, thinking back, we didn't even have a central file server to store maps and projects!!!

Things haven't really got much better. We now of course have a central file server, and within that a folder for 'textures', and in that folders for 'bricks', 'concrete' etc. But there are many objects/textures that don't quite fall into a nice category.

So many folders occasionally do cause us problems with bitmap paths and network rendering. The list of bitmap paths for each 3dsmax.ini file is HUGE!!! We also have issues with duplicate textures in different folders.

To change everything now would be both difficult and time consuming. Also, older projects would loose there structure.

Its a tricky one.

[Infrared digital]

I am restructuring our system at the moment and for a small company it is still a big job with alot of time spent checking every file.

Haven't got to the meshes yet but if the textures are anything to go by, I might be here all weekend.

When all that is done, I will have the pleasure of setting up the distributed rendering !

Its all worth it in the long run, I am sure.

regards

n