Organizing blender - how do *you* do it?

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

Hey all!
Right now I’m working on a little webcomic idea. I reuse lots of objects, and keep them in a library to be imported as needed. Here’s my organization:

A) I make a folder hierarchy:
Projects
project #1
project #2
etc…

inside a project:
objects
scenes

B) I use seperate .blends for every frequently reused object. (using groups to make importing easier)

C) I make ‘studio’ .blends that have my lighting setups / backgrounds. I then import objects to these and place / animate

This works for me, but what works for you?
Post your organization!

2

Man, :eek: you surprise me. Actually, I don’t use any kind of organization (I’ve never made such a big project) I just have all my .blends in the default .Blender folder :wink: .
But when I get out of school next week I’ll have more time to think of making a big project :smiley: , so, if I come up with a new way of organizing the files I’ll tell you :yes: .

3

I think different types of projects will reflect different org approaches, especially since Blender is very often an asset builder for larger projects.

I’m working on a non real-time ‘adventure’ style game that is predominately image driven, so there is an endless list of mini animations, full animations, cube-face panoramic images, GUI elements, prop objects, etc. spanning hundreds of locations from which I must render different views.

I’m relying heavily on linked objects, trying to build my game sets from as many linked elements as possible. This creates more need to go back and forth opening different blends to re-edit an object, but it allows me much more structure, tracking of multiple versions of an object, without getting lost. For example, during the game, a scene may change because it is at night instead of the day. It will have all the same objects, but the sky and lighting will be different. I first take my ‘day’ blend scene and save it as a ‘night’ version. I then delete the linked lighting and world .blend files, and relink to the ‘nighttime’ versions that I created earlier. (and re-save)

I have a common library for things that will be everywhere, like inventory items, landscapes, otherwise I save the files in ‘game set’ sub-folders. I preface the files with a prefix naming the type of object stored like ‘Mat_’, “World_”, “Light_” so that my object name is not confused with the type. Scenes intended to provide final renders are prefaced with strings like “Set_”, “Prop_”, or “GUI_”.

I’ve set the file selector in my blender to default to relative directories because I want to store all results locally under each blend file.

Several big advantages I’ve found to linked objects:

  1. I can focus on editing the object, lighting, etc in a clean environment.
  2. I don’t accidentally edit other stuff.
  3. I can make simple ‘standin’ objects for things like lighting setups or world settings.
  4. I can still link between blend files, ie to properly light an object I’m editing, I might need to bring in a lighting or world setup I’ve already created, so I know my object will look right when rendered in the final dedicated scene.
  5. Changes to an object will propagate properly to all the scenes that use it.
  6. I can edit and save multiple versions of an object, making it easy to track and edit which version of the object I’m using.
  7. Some of my sets are getting very big, super-high polys, massive HDR sky images. With my final scenes mostly populated by linked datablocks, I can afford to make many many variations without bloating my hard-drives.

Hope this inspires someone.:slight_smile: