Naming and Folder Structure Survival kit

Lots of persons and projects failed because of bad file naming or wrong folder categorizing!

This is common that lots of artists are not very concern about make right file name and giving them to supervisors.

The biggest problem for supervisors is to find one a specific file, or they have to spend lots of time to find it.

This is the responsibility of supervisors that categorize the folder and make a good file naming template at first place.

For example in most case if we have file with content of “tree” we will have these as well :

tri1, tery1, tre11, tree01(a genius)

and when it come a different version of that file we will have these too:

tri01
tri 2
tri333,
tery aa
tery bbb
teryy cccccccc,
tree01
tree02
tree03(previous genius)

or when we have more than one artist (puffff):

tri 1
tery bbb
tre3

Now let me introduce the problem

The most important points in naming:

There are several cases that must pay attention in naming a file:

Keep in mind that you don’t have to write any date or time in filename because it has it on its metadata.

For Example:

tree_model_ken

tree-red_model_ken

When you have multiple files with about a same content you have to identify them with numbers or different adjective :

tree01, tree02, tree03, tree-red, tree-yellow, tree-green

or

tree01-red, tree01-green, tree02-red, tree02-green

An important thing when we browsing a file or exploring the folders is they have to be sorted from top to down.

In this case we add a count at first and the last part of the filename to solve this issue.

With combining these rule we will come with an more efficient filename:

#_ObjectName(-other syllables)_ObjectLevel_Artist_#

For example:

01_tree_model_ken_01

or

01_tree-red_model_ken_01

All the counters start from one ( 1 ) and padding depends on our file count estimation

For example:

01_tree_model_ken_01

02_tree_uv_ken_01

02_tree_uv_ken_02

03_tree_texture_ken_01

04_tree_texture_cloud_01

05_tree_shading_ken_01

05_tree_shading_ken_02

As you can see, when the file changes from model to uv the first counter increased and later when the artist what to make backup and have another version of the modified file he saved the file with increasing the second count.

And when the level changed from uv to texture the second counter resets to 01 again.

By using these file naming structure you will have files separated with various levels and artist and always will be sorted by name from first step to end.

Catergorizing :

Now with having a good file naming we have to categorize our folders to access them in shortest time and spending energy.

For example:   

As you can see this folder structure are useless.

In categorizing files and folders it’s better to put related folders in a same directory, whatever we limit that choices we spend much less time and energy to find our files.

For example:

Let assume that we use Maya for artist parts and Unity in Develope department,so we will have this folder structure.

As you can see the folders are separated in multiple general group, please note that some folders like “sounds” would be duplicated in Dev too, that means the folders in the main “Sounds” are the source file and the “sounds” in unity are the exported file that will be used in our game.

And as it is in “texture” or “scene” within maya will exported by “fbx” format to use in unity.

I hope this would help you to improve working on you projects.

Thanks to Hamid Alizade for pushing me to write this paper.

Saeid Gholizade.

[email protected] +989126445531

http://kenculate.blogspot.com