Here is the latest incarnation of the folder structure I am using for my short film, Cyan Eyed. A lot of these folders are automatically generated from Maxscript tools I have developed.
All up, I've written about 6000 lines of Maxscript for this film alone, which includes major tools such as a 'Scene Build' tool (part of my 'Shot Tools' UI shown below, lot's more features in the rollouts that are collapsed) that automatically builds a scene from latest versions of assets, loads in the latest textures and shaders, brings in the latest lighting and camera, and then imports the latest animation data.
I have also written my own render layers tool ('Cerl': Cyan Eyed Render Layers) for Max that I'm considering of releasing publicly...still thinking about this one (UI shown below). I've implemented the powerful wild card system from Houdini for selecting objects. For example:
geo_* ^*cars* *_damaged
Selects all objects starting with 'geo_', then subtracts from the selection all objects with 'cars' in them, then appends all objects ending with '_damaged'. I can also add and subtract layers and selection sets in the same line by using different symbols. I can even access an external file list in a text file if I want to reuse a list that has hundreds of objects. For example:
&town ^%trees #C:\objList.txt
Selects all of the objects in the layer 'town', then deselects all objects in the selection set 'trees', then appends all objects listed in the text file 'C:\objList.txt'.
All of this interacts with my folder system that basically manages itself through my Maxscript tools, I rarely have to create any of these folders manually. There are two main folder structures that I mainly work in, Assets and Sequences. I have included screenshots and descriptions below.