Texture organization - need advice

[andrewjohn81]

I've got some ideas, but I think our needs to be fixed. We have folders like construction and architecture, but have folders outside of those like wood, bricks, cement. It's just a mess to find things logically. We've got a meeting with the 4 of us here to discuss how/if we want to change it.

I'm hoping a few of you will be willing to share your basic structure? Maybe a quick screenshot in folder view or typing it out would be fine also.

I don't want it to go more than 3 folders deep, but I'm interested to see if that is working for anyone to have more than that. I was hoping to get some ideas from sites like turbosquid, but they don't have very good organization either. They have textures, but then I couldn't find any categories inside there at all other than most expensive, new, and most used. Well, that's not useful at all for this.

Hopefully some of you will have a couple minutes to share what your thoughts are. I'll post what we came up with after the meeting.

[MoonDoggie]

Here's what I've come to realize. When organizing textures/models and such it's important to not get too specific, for instance (extreme example).

Your folder structure appears like this:

Maps
   Stone
      Concrete
         Precast
            Grungey
               Dirty
               Moldy
   Wood
   Metal

In this situation what if you have a non-precast concrete that is also grungey and dirty, where does it go? Another set of folders that are "grungey"? I only warn against this because we ran into it.

Good luck, I'm looking forward to where this goes,
Colin

[andrewjohn81]

I agree, we have the same problem. Some folders are too specific. Many textures end up fitting into both categories, so where does it go?

This is what we have right now, but I don't like it much at all. Things like a white leather folder in a leather folder. There's probaly 3 files in there. Reference isn't actually a textures folder, but it fits well in there. There mostly just image references. I didn't expand wood because it's too long. I've got a folder for each type of wood plus a misc folder for ones i was not sure about. Rugs inside carpet makes sense for us because they are more like oriental rugs that you would never want to see when looking for carpet. I don't think anyone would ever want an oriental rug tile across their whole floor.

anyway, that's enough notes about it. It will change. Hopefully some of you guys will share some more and we can get a little bit of discussion going.

[MoonDoggie]

Easiest to kiss (keep it simple stupid) honestly. Things should never be color specific, because frankly I never remember if there is a white folder, and what happens when I get just 1 "chinese yellow" color? Where does it end?

[jonahhawk]

ideally, a database would be the solution. With keywords for each image. Then each image could fit in several categories. Search for leather would bring up all colors of leather regardless of where they are on the drive. Search for white would bring up all the white images, including the white leather.

No one wants to create or manage this though. This is what summer interns are for!

[siliconbauhaus]

I have my stuff seperated out such as
exterior / site / grass or
exterior / wood or
interior / flooring / wood

Having used this for a coupl of years I'm thinking of simplifying it to something like wood / interior. I dont see the point of spliting things by colour as you can always see whats in that folder.

[Kyle_Grace]

We're going through the same process of organisation. There is always a difficulty with things like 'interior' and 'exterior' textures, as there are always some textures that will fall into both categories. I think we've come to the conclusion that we're just going to keep it really simple and have a material as head folder then any sub-categories within that. Anything that can be misconstrued is avoided. I.e.
Wood>Laminate
Wood>Dirty

I think it's more important to adopt a universal strategy to the organisation and stick to it.

[andrewjohn81]

We won't get an intern unless they do some sort of project that is both useful to us And them. I think that's a good program to have. Otherwise we'd just have them running to get us all coffee all day.

I agree. I wouldn't separate things as internal/external as so many things would be both. Like Flooring, shrubs and things like that. Many things like cement can simply be interior by adding whatever gloss you want in the mat settings, and have them more dulled and maybe bumpier for outdoor, just for example.

I was more hoping to find what other people were doing for non-architecture things. For instance I also have a bunch of food, we've got reflection maps galore, and even animal skins for who knows what. Surprisingly a couple have actually been used since I've been here. I was just wondering what types of categories other people were using. Also for architecture and design people, I wondered if many of those textures were in a folder structure where the less used textures where all gathered by one singular folder, or if they were spread out like in the example I showed.

I am already aware that it's not a good idea to have specific folders where objects might fit into multiple folders. This is one reason for the reorganization. I was just curious to know what other people's structures were so we could take the good ideas from some people and apply it to our own, then share the results of ours that best fit how we work.

I think many studios will have a different setup just because of the nature of the work. I would never have a need for things like grungy metal, but I know a bunch of people that would. Keep sharing though. I've been hearing some good stuff.