Something I just learned. (and I thought I was smart. Laugh, Live and Learn, LOL) I have never organized and stored the Mat.s or Obj.s or other things I have created in the Bryce folders. So, they are not all available to me when I am working on a project from within Bryce.

I know, How dumb can you get?

I only archived the Bryce files w/ photo. After studying the threads for 2 weeks, I realize that I need to do some filing/organizing of the mats and other things I have created this last 5 years. :(

In particular, I wonder how some others keep their mats and objs organized.
Any suggestions on how to approach/organize this formidible chore? ( 5Gigs of files)

This is a fundamental issue which ,in my excitement to learn the program , I completely overlooked. I thought it might make a good thread for newer Bryce artists to read.

What do you think.:)
with humility,
Mike

I just use several different folders and I put the same catagory of Mats in the folder like Tree barks,Grounds,Rocks ect and then when I need the extra Mats I will go and find the whole Folder and import as a User file and there I have all of the Materials or Objects I need for any project,Granted it did take a long time to Organise them but once I did I just exported the whole Library out and saved on my harddrive for use when needed...Well worth the time and effort...No more Wasteing time looking for that mat or Object...

@foleypro - as for organizing external objects (obj, etc.), how do you organize them by category and also retain the creator info?

Being the a-r o-c that I am, I have a lot of them organized in Microsoft Access..I include a thumbnail of each for each record, and have probably 60% of them done right..;) Have downloaded about 900 unique mats so far..I tend to rename them on download, usually with _sitename, so if I lose them, I can get them back (as long as the site's still there..alas for Lannies'..;)
I actually started a database of mats, but never finished it. One thing I've done on occasion is to rename the actual file, from s**i_020, to 'stoneblocks', or something along those lines.
I keep all the mats downloaded in a seperate directory..there's a little trick with Bryce, in that if you find the user.mat file, copy and rename the copy to some category (I have Organics, Building Materials, Metals, etc), and copy it into the same directory, you can pull up mats a lot faster. This creates new categories under user, when you pull up your mats. Then import the relevant mats to the relevant 'categories' (note- if you already have some mats in your user file, all copies of User.mat will remain at least the same size as the original mat, no matter how many mats are actually there, or not. From there, they only get bigger..;)
hope this helps.

Attached Link: http://users.tns.net/~mwalter1/tutorials.htm

Many thanks!! An Access database is an awesome idea (another o-c here). And that tutorial will come in handy, kimpe.

Great answers all, and thanks for your thoughts and expertise. Now to the hard part.....going thru all 600+ Bryce files and evaluating/copying all those things in each file. See you soon. :) Mike