Hi Dion, Bean lurking for quite a while but there wasn’t anything I had to say, before this post that is :) Any more progress on Thoughtscore?

“Question about your setup – with the Blender projects won’t they link into other directories such as within the renders folder (for sequencing) as well as into the images folder (for generic textures?) As for Webdev, don’t these need to be under the public_html folder (assuming apache is in use)?”

All my blender projects have there own local textures and render directories, for example the structure of my BWC 08 entry is as flows:

BLENDER/projects/The_bird_and_prey : Blend file and final renders
BLENDER/projects/The_bird_and_prey/refs : reference images
BLENDER/projects/The_bird_and_prey/textures : Project textures

Texture images usually get pretty mashed up through UV painting and backing, so they are normally not duplicated exactly. Though the textures probably would be better in a subdirectory of the BLENDER directory. Currently I have not worked on a project which is large enough to require a lot of linking so it hasn’t bean too much of a problem.

“Sounds like a realistic setup, although I don’t think I’m that comfortable with using SVN – it’s rather cumbersome. I just access my files remotely through the cloud.”

Subversion has its problems, however from my experiments with other tools (Unison, BZR, GIT) its just the best tool for my current situation, where I am off-line a lot of the time.

I have a script which automatically adds new files to the repository, deletes ones which have bean deleted in the file manager then commits everything. It almost completely removes the manual work required.

The biggest problem that I have with other version control systems is the lack of partial checkouts, which I use to keep a copy of my collage work on a USB pen drive.

How will changing files outside the directory of the project affect the project itself? I would move ALL files related to the project, regardless of file-type within the project directory.

hari, I think the main problem is that if you have a very long term project which references files, as your structure gradually changes over time to accomodate other files this old project which you’re afraid will break its links means that it’s inconvenient to move these age-old files.

Yes, but if you store these project files independently and use all references within its own directory structure, it should be independent of external files outside the project dir, no?

Question about your setup – with the Blender projects won’t they link into other directories such as within the renders folder (for sequencing) as well as into the images folder (for generic textures?) As for Webdev, don’t these need to be under the public_html folder (assuming apache is in use)?

Sounds like a realistic setup, although I don’t think I’m that comfortable with using SVN – it’s rather cumbersome. I just access my files remotely through the cloud.

hari, I think the main problem is that if you have a very long term project which references files, as your structure gradually changes over time to accomodate other files this old project which you’re afraid will break its links means that it’s inconvenient to move these age-old files. I think that’s that scenario I’m in (and honestly I can’t get out of it at all easily until I finish the project).

I don’t understand. If I have a complex project, I put it under a subdirectory “Projects” which stores all the related files.

Only the individual documents are stored in other folders.

ANIMATIONS – Stores rendered animations.
BLENDER – Blender related projects
MISC – Miscellaneous stuff
MUSIC – Music that I listen to
PICTURES – Mainly my photographs, contains some non project specific textures
PROGS – Programs that I am working on which dont have there own repository, mostly small automation scripts.
WEBDEV – Like progs, but for websites
WORK – Collage work

Primary folders are capitalised so they stand out obviously from other files that get put in there, normally by mistake.

It would be imposable to list the entire file management system here, as I have a LOT of files, however that’s the basics of it. I also have some files which are maintained out of the primary tree which includes things like programs which have there own repository, a check out of the Blender trunk and a folder containing stuff which I have downloaded off the internet, mostly PDF documents and the like.

Partial SVN checkouts are used to move the needed parts of the repository across different computers, whenever there is ether not enough space for the whole thing (50 + GB) or preforming a complete checkout would take too long.

The vast majority of the files are plain text (source code or LaTeX) ,images and blender files.

Erik, nice to see you here again, I’d thought you had disappeared! Anyways it does actually seem that the Windows and Mac folks (especially the Mac folks) tend not to bother so much about file organisation now especially with indexing and things like the spotlight search (which I hear is very effective). However do you run into problems when having to transport or archive files – where such searches don’t work so well?

Erik,
Sweden.

E.g.

Documents -> store all kinds of text and formatted documents, including e-books.

Images -> a store for images, further sub-classified according to the purpose/project.

Videos -> video files each movie/tv show in their own subfolders.

Photo Album -> A separate directory structure for my photos

Music -> All the music files

Projects -> My programming projects each in their own subfolder.

public_html -> my local development web folder.

That’s about it. It’s a simple system and it works for me. :)