I just noticed Phil made a post to remind you guys to back up your work. My advice:
It's EVIDENT that you keep copies of your files of different stages of progress. Like this:
character_model_1_(base)
character_model_2_(hands_added)
character_model_3_(hands_combined_with_body)
and so on. Do it. Maya (or you) will always screw up at some point and you'll be extremely happy to have an older version of your file to roll back to. If also helps you recycle some stuff for future models.
Here's a little free tool for us windows users made by some called "Dimio". (On website, scroll down)
DSynchronize Website
It lets you set up source & destination paths and copies the most recent files to a directory of your choice. Very basic, very handy. Best copy to at least one external harddrive every day before shutting down. If you lose your files, it's your fault.
Note on the side: Since I started using PC's over 10 years ago, 4 harddrives have died for no reason, including a backup harddrive. It will happen to you too! ;)
Pol (my ex UCA blog)
It's EVIDENT that you keep copies of your files of different stages of progress. Like this:
character_model_1_(base)
character_model_2_(hands_added)
character_model_3_(hands_combined_with_body)
and so on. Do it. Maya (or you) will always screw up at some point and you'll be extremely happy to have an older version of your file to roll back to. If also helps you recycle some stuff for future models.
Here's a little free tool for us windows users made by some called "Dimio". (On website, scroll down)
DSynchronize Website
It lets you set up source & destination paths and copies the most recent files to a directory of your choice. Very basic, very handy. Best copy to at least one external harddrive every day before shutting down. If you lose your files, it's your fault.
Note on the side: Since I started using PC's over 10 years ago, 4 harddrives have died for no reason, including a backup harddrive. It will happen to you too! ;)
Pol (my ex UCA blog)
Hey Pol:D Thanks for posting - much appreciated. Let's see if we can get through this year without any such disasters...
ReplyDeletegreat post!
ReplyDeleteOne of the first things I told our group (B3D) was to use a naming convention, similar to what you have described, except we also put our initials after the version number too. This way no one can accidentally make a new file with the same name, so when syncing, nothing is accidentally overwritten. This is only necessary for group projects though.
Another naming convention your group would benefit from is putting the type of object into both the models name & the textures name. Ie - Environment props as env_, characters as Char_ (Go even further with artistinitial_char_) etc. This way things become a lot more smooth when moving assets around.
ReplyDeletehttp://kiiroblade.blogspot.com/2009/11/naming-convention.html
ReplyDeleteMaybe this will help.
Our minds think alike... we've also been doing that too...
ReplyDeletewould you believe that when modeling the spaceman I ended up with over 100 versions of it. The full naming convention I used was
TypeOfFile_NameOfFile_Version_Initials_AditionalNotes
So my spaceman file became
Model_Spaceman_101_ES_AditionalNotes.ma
Bit of a mouth full, but very safe!
100 might be a bit too over the top, but if you got the harddrive space, why not.
ReplyDelete