sketchyvisuals

Workflow Tips: Folder Structures

Added 2024-06-19 14:00:25 +0000 UTC

When I was new to 3D I spent years working in messy folders and not setting up folder structures appropriately.

Most of this was due to not being taught any different, and my process would become more messy the further I progressed into a project.

--> Why do we want a folder structure? (If that isn't obvious)

Most of it comes down to not just a neat working pattern. But making your workflow as autonamous as possible.

What do I mean by that? I can revisit any of my old projects and find stills, animations or project files without a thought, its all muscle memory.

One incredibly useful side effect of this, is the ability to then create a structure within the way you build projects themselves. By that I mean a Look Development process.

Let's break it down:

1 - Lets say you have a model you want to do an animation with, yet you have no idea where to start.

Start by doing Lookdev & RND on the model. If you build a master scene, that's focused on texturing and lighting the model to discover what works. You can build from there. (I mean something really simple, basic lighting, texturing, maybe some cloners.)

2 - Now you have a lookdev scene you can delegate that into different lookdev scenes. That are potentially more complex. By pulling the model from the lookdev scene when you need it for a new scene.

3 - But you want to build an animation, so instead of animating all your shots in one scene with 4 different renders settings and frame ranges. You have similar folders, within your folder structure, designed for animated scenes and animated renders. Now you can pull your lookdev scenes into these animation folders that can be names for example: s001, s002, s003 etc.

You have seperate scene files for each shot. Which allows you freedom to change lighting or the scene entirely. This is how all large scale animations are built.

Seperate to that linear process of building an animation. You should have padding around these folders that allocate room for integral parts of the process. Like assets, animatics, references and so on..

If you aren't working in a Solid Folder structure currently download the one attached.