How do you organize your Blender projects folder?

[AmyLily]

(Moderators feel free to move this to off-topic if it’s more appropriate)

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Hey everyone, I’m going to re-organize my entire blender folder so I thought why not make a topic about this subject. Right now I’m starting to have trouble finding older projects in my folder and when I’m working on something new I’m never sure where to put it.

At first I used to separate my projects by year, and inside each folder they get separated by the type of project they are (objects, characters, weapons etc). The problem is that this didn’t make things any easier to find, instead just scattered everything around. Some projects could also fit into multiple categories making it hard to decide where it should go.

As you can see with time I started making folders for more specific projects outside of the yearly ones. I even made shortcuts linking these projects back to the yearly folders so I could have them in both places, it’s an ugly and messy solution but it helped me to keep track of them.

So how do y’all organize your projects folder? I’ll be happy to get some ideas.

[joseph]

My Blender folder has the following structure:
– Blender
– – Alpha textures
– – RGB Textures
– – Brushes
– – Renders (contains my best renders, essentially a quick grab-and-go portfolio)
– – Builds
– – Archive (every couple months, I zip up my whole Projects folder, and toss it in the Archive. These are named MONTH_YEAR - MONTH_YEAR.zip)

– – Projects
– – – YEAR_month_title
– – – – autosave
– – – – renders
– – – – textures

My project folders aren’t all that neatly organized, but that’s the ideal, anyway

In that project (YEAR_month_title) folder, I have the main_file.blend and a blend1 that autosaves. The autosave folder then has two more autosaves. For larger projects, I’ll periodically save a new copy of the file with a _number suffix; I use the PowerSave add-on, which makes this very simple and easy. Some of my project folders have up to 70 different revisions, so I can easily move through time if needed.

[sozap]

Hey !

Interesting topic !
Storing projects per year makes sense, storing them per category too, it’s possible to do the other way around too, like category / year / projects.

Since you have a lot of projects it might be hard to easily navigate through them no matter what organisation you find.
But what you can do is to have multiple views of the same things !

What you can do is to have a folder with a few images of every project, being wip or final, these are duplicates ( so each projects got their renders alongside the working files), but if these are named correctly you can always scroll through renders and then find back the project using it’s name or year.

My own organisation is a bit simpler since I tend to work on only a few projects per years.
I’ve got all my clients names, and inside one folder per project.
I’ve also a folder for my personal projects, and it’s basically the same thing.

At some point I tend to backup/archive the oldest projects so I only keep what is relevant or WIP.
Once in a while I dig a bit into my archives to look for old stuff, but that’s like one or two times a year.

I also have a showreel folder with a render of everything I did, that is kind of similar to the render folder I was referring to. In general I’m more interested in the final version of my projects.

I also have an asset library with a lot of textures, 3D models and so on that I tend to reuse from project to project.

When I want to reuse something from an older project, generally I make a copy in that resource folder, so I generally don’t have to dig too much in old stuff, only once in a while.
How I organize that asset library, that’s another story

In the end, you might find a better organisation by thinking about what you need to do with these files, how do you interact with them …

Good luck !

[AmyLily]

Thanks you two for the responses, I’m still at the planning stage trying to figure out the best way to do this.

Having the year-month on the project folder name is good for organization but for me it just makes it harder to scan the name of what I’m looking for. My other problem is that I have to guess in which year the project I’m looking for was made. Thinking about it I also don’t care much about the year something was made to put it in the folder name.

I already keep reusable assets like textures, HDRIs and alpha maps in a separate folder, rendered images and animations also go to a separate location from the blend files. I should probably start to archive old projects since I don’t really need to go back to them. Storage is not a problem now and I was surprised to see that my blender folder is still less than 20gb.

I have this habit of saving almost every single test that I do and now there’s hundreds of blend files in this folder. I’ll probably delete most of them, no need to keep this stuff.