Had a chance to talk to some veteran FX artist and he mentioned that at a few studios he worked at, the folder structure would separate publish and private all the way at the beginning. This is their attempt to make sure the publish folder is never touched by human hands.
Had any one every worked on this structure? I would love to hear your opinion please. I think itβs a cool concept myself since the production folder at my studio has a lot of trash and random stuff which were put there manually by individual artists.
Such that each asset has a single root, followed by children that are either development or published files. Both published and development then have their own independent versioning, such as user A can have his/her own versioning, never seen by anyone except him/her, and published files have a universal naming scheme.
Make it a pattern that every level of your hierarchy can have a private and public child directory.
βββ project
βββ private
βββ public
βββ shots
β βββ public
β βββ private
β βββ shot1
β βββ public
β βββ private
βββ assets
βββ public
βββ private
That way, anyone can work anywhere, and publish anywhere, in context, and with no mess. For example, they could work directly on the project, in case of animatics of project-wide concept art and story, they would work on the top-level asset for the same reasons, or as specific as within a subcomponent of an asset, like a helmet rig, all within the same architecture and your tools will work identically across any level of specificity.
How do you type the folder hierarchy? Copy pasting from yours for now.
The work anywhere is sort of a thing Iβm trying to limit tho. My current system got the modeling, layout, animation and lighting under control but preproduction and comp are still a mess. Not to mention we have coordinators (and most of the times our seniors) creating random folders all over the place. If only I can force every one to create /private/user folder
I imagine a separation at the root level would at least help the published files much more organized and easy to find.
Whenever there will be people browsing the folder structure they will work where they are not allowed to, even accidentally! The most consistent way would be to have no one ever work with the folder structure directly, which would mean you have to build an Asset Manager to replace any explorer/browser.
If thereβs still the need to browse the folder structure (even if itβs only sometimes) separating between publish and work as close to the root as possible is a great solution since they rarely even enter the published directory when browsing.
This is the opposite of what I mean when I said it had been my most rewarding experience.
A hierarchy like this leads to large amounts of duplication, even in the small example above youβve got 2 shots locations, and is therefore incredible brittle, especially when browsing and creating directories manually. Youβre given no guarantee for your tools that the hierarchies will remain mirrored and will sooner or later end up with discrepancies and tools that have to compensate for it.
At the end of the day, it comes down to what you can manage and that you remain consistent, and any hierarchy works. But out of all possible hierarchies out there, this is, imo, amongst the worst when it comes to building reliable tools.
This is the part where directory structure is programmed, and where artists donβt need to know where to start working or where to save their files. Theyβll just need to provide enough information for your tools to figure it out by themselves.
To demonstrate, I just created a project configuration for your specification above.
$ be new panupat --name giant
Finding preset for "panupat"..
Pulling mottosso/be-panupat..
"giant" created
$ be in giant SC0070 --enter
No development directory found. Create? [Y/n]:
$ cd
C:\Users\marcus\giant\whatever_path\SC0070\private\marcus
$ maya