Project Organization

I posted this in General because I’m not sure if project structure organization falls under the Tech Art umbrella.

I work at a small studio, using both max and xsi. Most of the artists currently follow their own habits/practices for managing their project directories. That is to say, the max guys don’t use the max project structure at all, while the xsi guys do make use of the xsi project feature.

Generally, artist work locally, keep all of their scene files local, and then upload applicable exported files to our svn.

On our last project, however, the XSI artists all worked from a project located directly on the svn. This created an XSI directory in the existing SVN folder structure.

We are currently looking at setting up a project that both programs can access.

I’m interested to hear about how any of you folks tackle the problem of keeping everyone on the same page. Do your artists do a similar workflow to here? How much of the process relies on systems you have put in place, and how much does it come down to each individual following proper naming and organization?

Do you have separate projects for Characters, Props and Environments, or do each of your characters, props, locations get their own projects? Do your artists use projects only for working files/backup?

We are a small company, and currently most artists don’t touch the engine(Unity). The coders end up putting a lot of assets together in engine.

Looking forward to hearing how you handle this stuff! Thanks in advance!

Getting Max “relative path” projects to co-exist and/or play nice with XSI projects is going to be somewhat painful.

But… I’d recommend setting up some semi-automated FBX transfer pipeline if switching data between Max and XSI is really needed.

Make sure you get some “tech art” standardized FBX export settings distributed to all artists.

SamiV.