What makes a good directory structure for production?

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1

Hi all,

So I’ve been wanting to do a short animation with Blender for a little while now. Most of what I’ve done to date is short animations for teaching in a high school, or similar for the local theater company. However, I’d like to try something that will challenge myself more, So the idea is to do a series of short sci-fi animation with Blender and using Mercurial, and bitbucket.org to handle version control (Thanks to theLibrary Linking & Asset Management by Colin, and Using Mercurial Version Control with Blender Projects over at CGCookie, which have inspired me to attempt this) I’ll also be using Photoshop for modifying textures, and other software as needed.

This is my first attempt at trying such a thing and I’m unsure of how to begin. So can anyone recommend a good directory structure to organize all the files in?

I was thinking of having;

  • char
  • enviro
  • prop
  • scene
  • texture

But I’m unsure if it would work well, or if I have missed something?

Cheers,
Jamie

2

I do more live-action filming than animation, but it’s similar in some regards. I usually break the movie down by scene (if your animation is super short, you may have only one scene), and then organize folders like you have above within each scene. And you’ll need to account for sound as well. You may need music folders, recordings, mixed effects, foley and dialogue.

You might want to organize concept art or storyboards, too, if you have any.