Best Practices

Best Practices are an important part of content creation pipelines. With best practices defined, disseminated and adhered to you create an environment where the number of ‘knowns’ is greatly increased and the possibility of failure reduced. Without the predictability of best practices projects have a tendency to gravitate toward entropy. And by the time the negative impact of entropy is noticed it is often too late to be addressed in a meaningful way. Beside avoiding the negative impact of entropy, best practices create a consistent and intuitive environment for content creators and the tech team that helps support them.

There are a several ways best practices contribute to a project:

1. Developers working on common tasks know: where things are, what they are called and how the assets themselves are organized
2. Shared environments, either in DCCs, proprietary tools or game engine, are organized and kept up to date in a consistent way so that all users in that environment know what to expect.
3. Clutter that can easily accumulate during long production cycles is greatly reduced 
4. Training is easier as content creator know what to expect within their environment
5. Tools can be more effective because they can be written with the expectation that they know where things are and what can to be done with them
6. Debugging is easier as the individuals doing the work know what to expect and source is up to date with descriptions of recent changes that may have broke the build

Best Practices can be defined in a number of different ways. Different studios and project will have different needs, for the most part this these are the important things to consider:

• Naming convention

• Folder Structure 

• Defined expectation for asset organization in DCC

• Defined Source control policy

• Cleanliness

• Testing policy 

Here are some documents I have written on best practices:

<bp doc> Best Practices

<bp doc>Naming Conventions

<bp doc> Folder Structure