Folder structure in small studios

Pipelines
1

Hi There…

I’m curious how other small studios handle file/folder structures when it comes to using multiple packages. In our case, Maya, Lightwave, Houdini, ZBrush, Mudbox and After Effects.
I’ve read some of the other folderstructure threads but I’m looking for an answer that’s actually more ‘limited’ :slight_smile:

The suggestion is to change the folder structure so that things are more joint together. I myself am very hesitant to this as I can see this becoming one huge clutter. Others say it would simplify things a lot, which honestly I don’t really see yet. When we start working on a project, we choose per scene the best tool. That being Maya, Lightwave or whatever. All other package would have a supporting role on that scene. All packages output images sequences to an Output folder for Comping.

The question is really. Would you share 1 file structure (per scene) with all packages or each package have its own structure?

Packages seperate (What we have now)


Content\
      \Maya
             <package default structure>
      \Lightwave
             <package default structure>
      \Houdini
            <package default structure>
      \ZBrush
            <package default structure>

Joined


Content\
       \Scene_AA
                cache\
                clips\
                data\
                images\
                scenes\
                scripts\
                sourceimages\
                ...\
                ...\
                (assume below Maya style folder structure 12+ folders + nessesarry structures that the other packages need.)

Our situation is sadly so that a few ideal things like having a structure manage by a tool is not possible due to budget constraints, yada yada. :slight_smile:
With that said I’ll lay down some of the constraints we have.

  • We work on a share network drive
  • Getting an asset manager is not feasable
  • versioning is not really a problem at this time.
  • models, vert caching are shared the most.
  • Textures are shared the least… 0.0001% of the time… Most shading is done procedurally.

I myself work in Maya. With Maya’s structure I can basically work on multiple scenes without changing the default file structure (scenes\SceneNameA_01.mb, SceneNameB_01.mb). I can basically have 1 Maya folder per project. Using Maya’s RenderLayers, I can even work on multiple shots in that scene without changing my structure. In Lightwave that’s a pain. Every Scene would need a new folder structure and every shot would need to be another scene “file” as there is no such thing as RenderLayers in LW.

Anyway… Keeping those things in mind. How are other studios dealing with this?

2

We mostly use the same folders for all related packages. For example, if Max/Maya/Zbrush were used in making a model asset, the model’s folder would have 3 files in it: <filename>.max, <filename>.mb, <filename>.ztl
We did not notice their files conflicting in any way.

It depends on the project, but shots or at least sequences tend to be separated into their own folders anyhow. If it gets too messy, we add max/maya subfolders to the shot/sequence folder.

Moving over to versioning in Perforce has made things a lot tidier for us lately. Versioning by hand does tend to result in quite a mess, not to mention the potential for horrible mistakes, especially on the network… So if mess is an issue, you could try separating the shot assets into subfolders by package.

Mirroring the whole tree for each package wouldn’t be a bad approach IF it was automated. An advantage of a mirrored tree is that a script can replace a single root folder in the path string and end up in the right place. Synchronizing the structures of 4+ folder trees by hand sounds like very tedious and pointless busywork, and it would be particularly annoying if artists would have to navigate from one package’s deep folders into another one’s equivalent folders often; quite a few of them wouldn’t figure out to change the name of the root folder in the address bar, but instead go all the way up, then all the way down the folder structure. This is a colossal waste of time, and a killer to flow.