Naming Conventions
Granville
Posts: 697
I am trying to convert the fantasy castle to a semitransparent ice castle. I am up against texture and bump maps with meaningless names. If you are developing content please names your textures something other than LS_K2CTB2bT.
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You have a couple hundred independent product makers.
Trying to get ANYTHING to have similar traits will be next to impossible.
Everybody thinks their way is the best and makes the most sense.......when in reality, it is MY way that is the best and makes the most sense :P
Rawn
I wish the creators would at least name their own stuff consistently.
Use the surface selection tool and simply click on the surface you want to alter!
LS = Laurie Stanley.
K2C = I think Castle Keep 2
TB = probably Tower bridge, if I'm right about the product
2b = the particular texture set
T = usually indicates a transparency map.
We use that sort of naming convention for servers at work. Thing is, everybody uses the same naming convention, and it's documented and published. Thus, it's useful.
This naming convention... not documented, not published, not consistent. Not particularly useful, except to the individual creator.
EDIT: When it comes to naming parts of things, I've always been more fond of the big list in the OED than of any set of "alphabet soup"...
T, B, D and S are usually the most 'common' parts of a texture file name...
T = transparency
B/D= bump/displacement
S = specular
Rawn...of course your way is best...but :-P, I'll do it my way, anyway!
it does not matter what you call them, you still get a big unweildy list
I found at least in studio you CAN use the surface selection brush and hold shift or ctl and eventually select them all
in Poser, Carrara and iClone you have no hope!!!
some models have 500+ surfaces so this gets impossible
in Carrara and iClone I have to drag drop paint a common shader on the model surface by surface in the scene, Poser I have yet to find a way.
dunno if one can create a shader with subgroups, I know in carrara I can have unused shading domains that overlap existing ones for stuff like hair growth.
Since that particular model and/or texture set was designed to work in Poser 6 and up as well as all versions of DS, the files would be set up to follow the rather strict runtime folder set up required by versions of Poser lower than 8.
Unique naming also prevents both Poser and DS from referencing the wrong files and applying the wrong textures.
T, B, D and S are usually the most 'common' parts of a texture file name...
T = transparency
B/D= bump/displacement
S = specular
Rawn...of course your way is best...but :-P, I'll do it my way, anyway!
D could also be Diffuse - the 'base' color.
EDIT: It would help immensely if the PAs or vendors would place their initials after the product name. E.G. 'Chamber Pot XYZ' In many cases you remember the product name rather than the vendor's name. This may not be very flattering for the vendors, but sorry...
RawArt, I'm not picking on you. I just picked you because you might be subscribed to the thread. And this is probably the best chance I have at convincing someone about the magnatude of the problem...
I have my Genesis content installed to I:\DIM_Content\Genesis. All subdirectories then branch from there:
...RawArt\Sasquatch
...People\Genesis\Characters\RawArt
...Presets\Characters\RawArt
And you are one of the PAs on the low end of this spectrum.
Unfortunately the far end of the spectrum is a couple of orders of magnitude worse.
The artist name in a variety of different sub directories...
spelled differently (spaces, dashes, possessives, etc.)...
including the artist name and product name in one sub directory name...
misspellings of the artist's own product names...
leaving work / temporary directories in the final compile...
etc. etc.
And for the PAs really bad about this, these issues compound on each other.
Then times this by hundreds of different artists.
My runtimes look like a riot of second graders; no order or sense to most of it.
I wish DAZ would start enforcing some sort of naming standards or quality control.
In my case, the reason for some characters being in the "presets" folder and not in the Genesis folder is simply that when d/s came out, it had no conventions at all where characters should go. So since they were called "presets" it seemed like the logical place for them was the "presets" folder.
But as the program evolved, then the standard place was to have them in the "figure/character" folder.....so after much deliberation, I choose to follow that convention as well.
As for textures...all mine are in a "RawArt" folder, and in a sub folder with the product name, so they should not be too hard to find. (sometimes the product name changes last minute, so the subfolder may not always be exactly the final product name...but it will at least be logical to the product)
Rawn
Yep. Mine are in textures/sickleyield for my solo products. If I have input where stuff goes in a coproduct it goes in a co-named folder, but I'm also not going to argue with my texturer when they put all the textures under their own name instead. Sicklefuse items have textures placed in textures/Sicklefuse.
I can't just select the surface. I am copy and pasting the opacity, refraction, reflection etc. Then I go in and reset the individual maps back to the right ones. They are in a directory with 400 other texture files --- all that begin with LS and a bunch of similar letters. Honestly only the content creator even knows that they are LS so it doesn't even serve her vanity.
I appreciate all that the content creators do for us. They are amazing artists. This fantasy castle is beautifully sculpted and textured. I would suggest that some grunt help with the naming conventions - not the actual content creator.
Or consider adding you vanity tag to the end of the name instead of at the beginning.
Thanks again RawArt for all your details in your handsome work. I often buy it even though I don't have a project in mind, because of it's twisted beauty.
IIRC, the Fantasy Castle is a PC product by Stonemason and Lisa Stanley created the add on texture set. You have two different artists creating two different items.
Well the inconsistent and changing folder structure I can understand to some degree. But what some PA's produce as file names is just baffling. If the artist Peter Smith releases in 2007 a product named 'Car Wash' that comes with the skydomes 'Night', 'Day' and 'Dawn', then the resulting preset files, in quite a few cases will be called 'PSCWN07', 'PSCWDA07' and 'PSCWDAW07'.
Well, that's a delight to work with!
And I will then go and rename them 'Car Wash - Night', 'Car Wash - Day' and 'Car Wash - Dawn', because I like to know what the hell a certain file is going to load into mah scene :D
Raw, I wasn't picking on you. Just pulling at your ear. You're one of the least objectionable of the naming issues.
...\People\Genesis\Clothing\Midnight_stories
...\People\Genesis\Clothing\Minight_stories
...\People\Genesis\Clothing\Misfit For Genesis
...\People\Genesis\Clothing\Mistfit For Genesis
...\People\Genesis\Clothing\Princess Asia
...\People\Genesis\Clothing\Princess of Asia
And this was just a quick glance for the ones that really, really irritate me.
There are a couple of things to bear in mind - in the past there have been quite strict limits on path lengths, and when you add all the nested folders to get to a texture (or geometry) file more user friendly names can tip the balance. Also, at least in the past, Poser was inclined to grab the first file that matched the target name even if the folder was wrong - adding artist initials is a way to reduce the odds of duplications and so increase the odds of the right file being loaded.
Understandable, but there is still no excuse for the errors that I listed as examples.
There were three chances for those errors to be caught and they slipped right through (creator, beta testers, DAZ quality control).
Beyond those errors, there is no reason why there should be PA names off of the main content directories or duplicate entries. At the very minimum some standards should be enforced at this directory level.
For example, I have DIM set to install most content to I:\DIM_Content\Genesis..
And these are some of the directories it created
Vanity directories: Dreamlight, RawArt, DMP Boudoir, Dystopia, Maclean, Damage Inc, LaurieS, Mood Master, Teresa Tyllo
Duplicates:
Light Presets / Lights
Shader / Shader Presets / Shaders
Tutorials / DAZ Studio Tutorials / Shader Mixer Tutorial / Figure Mixer Tutorial
Pose / Poses
Lights / Light Presets
Misspellings:
Enviroments / Environments
Almost all vendors use vanity folders. That is what the majority of customers want. They want every product from that artist to be in the same folder.
That's all well and good. But a vanity directory does the PA no good if they've misspelled their own name.
And there still should be some restrictions at the top level directory.
Spelling errors are going to happen whether we want them or not. It's a fact of life. Testers don't test from a personal runtimes to be able to compare to others. They use a blank runtime and unzip from there.
I am going to bow out of this conversation because you sound like you are taking it very personally.
No, it's not personal at all. No need to bow out. I'm just saying that it does happen to a lot of us. Some are caught in testing and some aren't. It depends if the tester is familiar with your file structure. It's not done on purpose that's for sure. Just saying it does happen
I can understand user frustration with (what seem to be) bizarre names, but what doesn't make sense to the user, may have made sense to the creator at the time. On the other hand, making sense to the creator alone isn't very user-friendly..
I was convinced by DAZ staff to use 'vanity' folders, and although I don't expect every user to recognise my name, I have to say, it makes life a lot easier. All my products, geometries and textures are in 'Maclean' folders, so there's no problem finding them, and I try to stick with sensible naming conventions for everything.
For example, I have several series of products - Interiors, Everyday, Room Creator, etc, and I use a simple naming formula. EvS1object.obj is from Everyday Stationery and EvS2object.obj is from Everyday Snacks. The textures from those packs are called EvS1texture.jpg and EvS2texture.jpg. In other words, I use the pack initials as a prefix, and the files are in Maclean/Everyday. I don't think I can get much simpler than that.
For me, one of the biggest hassles is naming body parts and materials. I make props, usually 40-50 in each pack, and it can be a real nightmare. I try to be consistent through all my work, but if I make say, a Dvd player, do I call the outer material 'casing', 'plastic' or 'outer'? What did I call it in a similar earlier product? Would it be better to use 'plastic' so a non-English-speaking person will know what I mean? Well, you get the idea.....
mac
Okay, just making sure. I might be pretty passionate about the conversation, but I'm not angry. The past three months have been almost exclusively trying to sort out my content. Today I have been trying to sort out all of the "Props" so it is still on going.
No one is prefect and mistakes happen, so spelling mistakes can be expected... but I still maintain that the mistakes I pointed out should have been caught by someone. Each one of those needed the other in order to be tested. They were all textures that needed the other directory for testing.
And I still think some sort of rules should be enforced at the top level directory. There really shouldn't be PA names that high in the structure. If there are, at the very least the PA should only have one. Not one with a dash in it, one with no space in it, one with a space in it, etc. etc.
Personally, I always move products out of the vanity folder. I use Poser, so I categorize my files by Runtime. Some of the top vendors even have their own runtimes.
Does anyone remember the old Poser 4 days.
I decided to categorise my runtime (we only had one in them days) So wanted to put all Posette's clothes into one folder.............hm didn't work, as I kept finding I had a product with a figure file just called ''tunic'', and then another product which had a figure just called ''tunic'', and so on. They didn't bother with unique names in those days, you had to rename files to get some sort of order.
Some things to keep in mind:
1) In some cases (where PAs have been around a long while) they may have changed their "vanity" folder name so in some cases having more then one can be due to this change. At one time we didn't have one at all and just named all our files ART_PackName then we went to some folders being called ARTCollaborations (which a couple years later we decided was kinda long) and so now we have switched to an ARTCollab folder which everything goes into. In those cases, the testers wouldn't catch any of those as being an "error" as they are all right and all allowed. If any of us is using a "vanity" folder it is for organization on upper levels so you don't end up with billions of files all at the top level of any given library making it really hard to find much of anything (that is how my person poser library is and UGH its a mess) The longer you do this PA wise the more stuff like this gets thought of or considered. So many years ago I don't know that even DAZ had considered the sheer volume of content there would be or the need to have things more deeply categorized. Had they or Smith Micro considered it, I'd assume the structures in both apps might have been done a bit different. But you cant see the future per say and while DAZ did whittle it more then what is in Poser, even it isn't done quite enough to organize on it's own well which means having to sort how you want it and do it best you can in a way that makes sense to you.
2) As far as it being caught in testing, sometimes that stuff is...sometimes not. If a Texture folder name is spelled wrong but that wrongly spelt folder is referenced correctly in all the files, it wouldn't be caught and even if it was it may not be changed since you can name a texture, geometry, or data folder whatever you like as long as in the references of other files the right file is being referred to. In the case of library folders being spelled wrong...since those are not used for reference paths, how they are spelled doesn't affect anything. (You could go in right now and add the 'd" that is missing from the one midnight_stories folder and it wont change of affect anything.) So nowhere during testing would that kick up any errors. The tester would just have to catch it themselves and even if they did, the PA could have meant to shorten the name so it still could be overlooked as being on purpose. Kinda like when we dropped the "orations" in favor of the folder only being named ARTCollab.
3) I have also seen some things purposely misspelled in some cases to avoid naming a folder the same as someone else's folder name who may be similar. Like someone spelling cat c4t or spelling a name oddly or purposefully wrong if it is a common name someone else is likely to also have used...(though I doubt that is the case in your examples)
4) Also of note sometimes in the Poser folder DAZ (and even other sites like Ro) will ask you to add xyz for V4, xyz for Genesis just to that folder so people can tell them apart while leaving all other folder named just xyz (hopefully that makes sense LOL)
Best thing I could say is if you see something like that which you feel may be a mistake, put in a ticket on it. When testing a pack there is A LOT to test for and it is very easy for a name, an extra space somewhere, even a small seam etc to slip by...especially when dealing with a large large pack. I have an alpha testing pit of like 7 people and still occasionally have stuff missed that the DAZ Testers catch. It is really easy for everyone to look right over the same thing. I've seen it happen LOL Best thing to do would be to put in a ticket to see about getting it fixed or if you don't want to do that, then just fixing the name to what you want as long as it is a Figure, Prop, Hair, Pose, Light, Camera, or Material folder name (or Characters etc as the case may be with DS File structure)
Honestly I dont know why it is called a vanity folder anyway (little off topic LOL) It is for organization more then anything...so instead of having to go into "Pose" and then see 456465132463545 folders, you instead see ARTCollab, DamageInc, RawArt, etc and then within those there are say 200 packs or whatever. Doing it drastically cuts back the amount of folders on the main "Pose" folder level. It isn't about vanity as much as it is an OCD thing me thinks (or at least it is in my case LOL)
Also of note, in most cases when it is a DAZ O you may be asked not to use your "PA Folder" but just to do a folder like ART_PackName but then on Brokered packs you can use a "PA Folder"...it is all rather confusing really ROFL