Organizing Your Own Collection or Resources

This is a pretty broad and open question:

What is the best strategy for organizing and using all your collected resources for SketchUp such as components, styles and materials?

I’d like to see what other people do to organize all your stuff and how to lay your hands on them an bring them into your work flow.

A favourite discussion of mine. :slight_smile: I’m a perfectionist in nature (which is a blessing and a curse at the same time).Through the years of using SketchUp I’ve developed my own way of keeping things. Of course there is now “right” or “correct” way of doing this as this is a purely subjective topic but I like when everything is organized, clean and close to perfect.
I have a separate folder, dedicated to SketchUp called SketchUp Stuff (same goes for Adobe products as well btw). Inside are some more folders and inside those folders are more folders. While writing this I remembered the traditional Russian Matryoshka Doll! It’s pretty much the same construction. The path tree would look something like this:

  • SketchUp Stuff
    • 3D Models (where I keep some very necessary/everyday/hard-to-find models)
      • 3D Trees
      • 2D Trees
      • 3D Water
      • Curtains
      • My 3D Models
      • (etc)
    • Community Resources (where I keep quick example models, screenshots etc for the Community)
    • IES Lights
    • Settings
      • Extensions RBZ
      • Plugins RB
    • Styles and Templates (where I keep my own carefully created styles for modelling, animation, drafting etc)
        1. Modelling Styles
        1. Drafting Styles
        1. Presentation Styles
        1. Sketching Styles
    • Templates (where I keep my own templates with specific parameters etc)

There are also some uncategorized files like:

  • Preferences.dat which hosts a rennovated keyboard shortcut information, which I’ve constructed myself and based on the human subconscious memory
  • Random documents, listing future project ideas, SketchUp related information etc
  • Also some very precious, unfinished 3D files buried deep down, waiting for a powerful notebook to handle them…

I keep my materials on the second partition of the hard drive, away from everything, which I’ve just realized is an illogical step. (I’ll move it to SketchUp Stuff as well). That folder includes textures which are categorized by their material or general surface where they’re applied.

:slight_smile:

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