Part 4. Storage of Digital Assets

File Size

File size is an important part of digital graphics. When sent over the internet or stored, a file on a computer would use a certain amount of resources. These resources take up space and have physical limits to their abilities. When looking at the size of the file, the bigger the file size, the longer it’ll take to load or render.

When talking about optical media, storage within the available space given needs to be within a certain limit, taking an Xbox 360 disc which can hold up to 8GB on a dual layer disc, the files within the disc may need to be compressed to allow full use of storage within the disc. Also taking into consideration the types of assets used, the files may be compressed into an allocated space, i.e. textures make up 20% of the disc, models 30% etc.

File Naming Conventions

Within your computer you have hundreds of files, these files are named and arranged in a way that is easily accessible to you. Many files within the gaming industry use file naming conventions, and folders that can easily be found and accessed, a good example for this is textures. Textures for 3D assets within a scene will be named differently compared to the model and what it will be used for, you can use the same model over and over however change the texture to make it appear different. A basic name convention for a texture would be; Texture_House1_Interior_Wooden. The name indicated that the file is a texture sheet, used for the house model interior, and the type of texture, in this case wood.
With this naming convention you can also get folders that branch out folders containing files should also use naming conventions.
This image shows the naming conventions within folders, the folder named Unreal expands into six more folders, containing Textures, which expands into six more folders and a file including the file GatePillar, which expands into two files. This tells me that these two files are textures for the GaterPillar for the Unreal scene.

Assets Management

Within the gaming industry, there is an assets management. This is used for management of assets within a game or another industry within media. Much like naming conventions for the folders, the folders are managed into their own subcategories where they can be easily found and accessed.

Within the games industry particularly there will be members of the production team that will be responsible for certain areas of the game, therefore will only need to access one section or one part of the files. For example texture artists will only need to access the textures folder whereas 3D modellers will only need to access the models folder.