Naming conventions seems like a boring subject huh? Well... it's not the most exciting part of the animation process, but it helps keeping all other activities more pleasurable and streamlined.
Blender 2.5 has a nifty feature of searching for the name of virtually anything you built in your 3D scene, but that doesn't mean we don't need to be organized. A very useful feature in Blender and most 3D apps is the ability to view your scene in a hierarchical tree-like structure, the Outliner window, as you can see in the following screenshot:
The Outliner shows all objects in our scene organized alphabetically and these are displayed according to their Parent-Child relationship. This is very useful, but you can make things easier to manage by adopting some organized naming conventions.
Our character Otto, for example, has his name as a prefix to all related objects. Meshes, Armatures, Lattices, Materials, and Textures—all start with Otto_. This is useful to separate them from any other object on the scene.
Note
Another useful tip to make our Outliner easier to manage is to add some Empty objects as parents of large groups of objects. The Otto rig for example, has lots of meshes created only to act as custom bone shapes. These objects would create an unnecessary clutter on our Outliner, so there is an Empty object named Otto_Shapes, with all shape objects as its children.
We can have two characters on the scene. Both of them may have a "skin" material applied to them, but they are not necessarily the same. Which one is Otto's skin and which is from the other character? And what about that "Shoe" object? It's easier to indicate the object's owner in the prefix, especially in larger productions.
When rigging, it's important to name bones according to their functions. Having prefixes such as D_ for deformation bones or M_ for mechanism, T_ for target, and so on, is useful for understanding the role of each bone, especially in complex rigs.
For the bones actually made visible to the animator, it's best to name them by their functions or areas of control, such as "Head", "Hand.L", and so on.