Organizing vismat materials

tomb85

Hi,

I'm beginning to have this problem of organizing all my .skm and .vismat materials.
Here at work every project has it's own 'project folder'. We also have this folder and subfolders with all my textures which i gathered through the years from various sources and websites. Sketchup materials are stored in the model but texture maps assigned to a .vismat are not.

If i want to assign a .vismat to my scene i simply load it in trough the vray material editor and take the .vismat file from this big 'textures folder'. Sometimes i need to edit the assigned bitmaps with photoshop to get another hue, so then i already get another version of the originalvismat file. This folder with all my textures really needs to get sorted out and reordered but then all the paths to the maps assigned to the vismats will be broken.
Should i better keep a copy of all my needed vismat materials in the 'project folder' for future projects? But then i'm afraid my materials

I'm just curious how you guys organize your vray materials collection, so it doesn't become a big mess over time. This question can be applied to any render engine, sorry if this is the wrong place to ask.

Thanks

valerostudio

Having all of your materials located on a shared network location is key for any office workflow. All workstations should have the same drive letter mapped as well. I never make duplicate copies of texture maps into a project folder unless it is very specific to the project, but even then, for me it makes much more sense to keep it in an organized library of materials to be shared and used on future projects. I have 2 libraries, one of texture maps organized by category and then a vismat library of materials that I have created and use often also in categories. Any maps associated with the vismat are located with the vismat file.

holmes1977

Im trying to reorganize my computer. I work from an office and from home. Do you think the best option for me is to have all my materials saved on to an external HHD?

valerostudio

Thats what I do. I map the drive the same letter on both machines. I would highly recommend that you backup the drive either to another external or locally on your home machine. Portable drives are highly unstable. I almost lost a lot of data this past year.