Assets management

Hope everyone’s enjoying the holidays and break so far :P

I’ve been trying to reorganize stuff to make our project development much more manageable (trying to apply what Danien went through with us the past two weeks), but I have to say this: No matter how we organize it, it still is a hell of a work, haha!

So here it goes: an attempt to streamline our “Assets management”.

I have already downloaded, exported to fbx, resized the textures and tested each and every single of the Models on the XBOX360, and so far they seem to be correctly loaded without issues(some misplaced parts here and there, but its easily fixable)

I have put up an excel file listing all the tested/ working models, and I have uploaded it along with the whole Assets files to my server, you can find it under the folders NM4343->CS4343->Assets

Note : Uploading the files to my server is a temporary solution until we get a proper source control system. I will email you the password separately so we can upload files there.

If possible, re-create the same directory structures on your machine to make things easier to manage.

I know it is simpler to just upload one zipped file which recreates the hierarchy, but since the assets are too big, you might just want to create it yourself and download whatever models you need to create the scene.

For my case (just like on the ftp), I put everything under D:\CS4343 and the hierarchy goes like this:

D:\CS4343

• Assets
• Animated Models : To put all our animated scenes
• Eg: Scene1 - my poor attempt at a scene. Its a plane crashing into a Nissan car.
  
• Source Models: This is whatever source models which we used(nothing is uploaded to the server yet since the whole thing is damn big)
• Source To Use: This is where I dumped all the models which has been touched up to work with XNA
• Documents: To put all other documents (eg story boards, game play design etc)
• Source: To put the source code for the game

We are going to be using the models from the “Source To Use” folder to create animated scenes for the game. If you open the folder, you will see many sub folders which contains both the model exported in .FBX along with the relevant textures. Please refer to the excel file for a complete listing of models and descriptions. (Last minute addition: the whole "Source To Use" folder has been compiled into one .rar file, much much easier to download. Just click here)

To use the models, open Maya and choose Import, and select the .fbx file. You will see that the textures will not show up. This is because the pointer Path to the textures are not correct, and to fix this, you actually need to go to the Hypershader under Rendering tools and point the textures to the correct path. But do not worry about this for now, just work with un-textured models first, I will fix it later (hopefully I can find a way to make the pipeline easier, if not, then I will do it manually for now)

Oh if you have read this, please put comments? just that i know that everything makes sense, or needs to be simplified or clarified? Cheers!