CGTalk - Naming Schemes

JookBoxer

11-10-2009, 03:04 PM

This is sort of a trivial question. But I was wondering how everyone else handles the naming schemes of there joints and so forth. For a time.. I used to do something like....

left_clavicle
left_shoulder

But now I'm finding that to be uneasy for reading. as I'm constantly reading left left left.. or right right right... so now I'm leaning more towards... clavicle_left.. etc.

But I'm interested in knowing other people's naming schemes in organizing rigs and scenes. Also do you do anything special differentiate rigs from each other. For instance, if rigs share similar names there could be a conflict if the rig were needed to be expanded in a scn. Do you actually goes as far as to label things like.

clavicle_left_Bob
clavicle_left_Joe

I'm really just interested in how everyone else makes it easier for themselves. Or do you use scripts incoporating text scroll lists to make things easier for yourself?

Darksuit

11-10-2009, 03:48 PM

I am a fan of "L_" and "R_". Why?

So when I am scripting I want to look for Very specific things, I also want to make sure my name length is not Too long. If I were to use "l_" and "r_" you can run into a problem when auto replacing those names. (example "l_ball_Ctrl" becomes "r_balr_Ctrl").

Since MEL is case sensitive, you will want to follow the naming convention set forth in the Docs, as uppercase first letter, lower case the rest. This helps in a number of ways. Where as MaxScript is not case Sensitive, I have to be a lot more specific, and the Upper and Lower case helps here as well, as I believe I can make MaxScript be forced to be Case Senseitive.

You can also run into problems if your name length is too long, not only from the name being force truncated, but also from buffer issues. The latter being not as much of an issue these days. This is one reason why I do not write out "left" and "right" long form.

Something to take into consideration is the organization and how you visiually need to see the objects in your scene. If you need to organize by object name then left or right, do that. My personal perfence is for left or right desigination first, then object. =)

Dave_Hingley

11-10-2009, 05:12 PM

i agree with Jook about using L_ and R_
i also try to prefix the hame with a unique 2 character id for example:

XX_L_Arm01

Now I can programatically target the left arm of a specific character. it is also possible to script chanages to affect all bones of a character by targeting the first prefix or target all left bones by targeting the second Prefix. you could also target all central bones by collecting the bones and removing from the list any that have a L_ or R_ prefix - there's probably a quicker method to do that but I havent realy had the need to do this
I am undecided about numbering wether its is a good idea to pad the numbering 01 vs 1 i guess a good advantage is that a list of bones in chain will be nicely formatted, unless there are over 100 bones then you would need to pad the numbered bones with 1 or 2 zeroes.

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