Renaming / Moving Assets and Blank Folders

qdelpeche · January 24, 2015, 6:34am

Overall let me first say that Unreal Engine is awesome and I have switched from Torque 3D to Unreal Engine because of its flexibility, ease of use, powerful tools and generally faster iterations than I could ever achieve in Torque 3D or any other engine. Please keep it up … you guys are doing an awesome job.

My one gripe however is the asset moving/renaming and the blank folders that are always left behind during this process. It is a major chore to get assets in to my preferred naming convention and folder structure that I prefer to use. I have basically resorted to creating a project for the various assets … I then migrate assets to that … and then start the renaming process and moving process. After I perform a step … I save the project … close the project … go to the folder structure and make sure the folders are actually empty … and then remove them.

This basic process is rinsed and repeated until I get the project opening with no errors. The folder removing is basically a copy to a temporary folder to make sure all assets are indeed un-linked and moved. Surely the editor should be able to handle this process for me … and I should have to continuously do this to make sure.

Once I am done and everything is still working and in my naming conventions … I then check the project in to source control and start the whole process again for the next set of assets. Below are some screen shots of what I mean … I am busy moving the Ultimate Rocks from the Marketplace in to this project in order to migrate it to my actual project.

The image below shows Folder structure and you can see I have a Material and Texture folder (my new folders) and a Materials and Textures folder (the original asset folders).

This is the Material folder that has the moved assets in it.

This is the Materials folder that no longer shows any assets in it,

However if I go to Windows explorer as shown below, the folders are also there as above.

But if I go in to the Materials or Textures folder, there are still UASSET files that are not shown in the editor.

If I remove these folders … the editor will generate issues although they are not actually in the editor.

And this is fundamentally the problem. So I have to sometimes move a folder a couple of times in the editor and eventually it will come right. This is however not always guaranteed and is sometimes very hit-and-miss.

Now I know that this may seem like a small and petty issue, but I keep my projects structured and named according to a strict standard for very specific reasons:

Project is easier to manage
Team members know where to find particular assets or blueprints
Project is more consistent
Offending assets can be easily identified

Could you please look in to this for me. Maybe I am doing something wrong (although I doubt it) and maybe you could provide some insight or even maybe some suggestions. If you could fix this … then that is even more awesome.

As I said … the Engine is awesome and you guys are doing a **** fine job. Not once have I ever felt that my subscriptions was a waste of time or money and I plan to use Unreal Engine for as long as it will have me.

My apologies for the long post, but hopefully I provided enough information.

Tim_Hobson · January 24, 2015, 6:55am

Hey qdelpeche,

I’m sorry you’ve been running into this issue and this is a common issue that a lot of people have run into. When you move a file from one location to another the engine will not automatically know where to find the files new location. A “redirector” will be generated that is left in the original folder. The image you’ve posted above with the Uasset files that are all ~2kb in size are the redirectors. When you delete these folders this is why you get the errors that you’re seeing about missing content.

You can read more about file redirectors in our documentation here: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Basics/Redirectors/index.html

Also, you can right-click on the folders and there is option that says “Fix up redirectors” to help with these types of errors.

If you have any questions feel free to ask and I’ll gladly help.

Tim

qdelpeche · January 24, 2015, 9:53am

@Tim: You rock … why the hell did I not see this before. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

I am happy to say that it worked like a charm and my only gripe is resolved … 8-}

UE4EVA

Tim_Hobson · January 24, 2015, 5:45pm

Glad everything is working well for you now!

labidus · September 6, 2015, 4:52pm

Instruction at least for ShooterGame:

anonymous_user_26e08efc · July 7, 2016, 8:05am

Dear All,

I’m facing a similar issue with the redirectors.

I purchased 2 nature packs at the Marketplace.
I add both to my project and they land in the main content folder. Nature Pack and Realistic Trees.
I want to move both folder contents into a NatureAssets folder.
I select the Mesh, Texture, Materials sub folders within the original Nature Pack and move them to my own NatureAssets Folder.

So far all works.
Now I remove the original Nature Pack folder from the Content menu.
I save my project and restart.
I try to place anything from my new moved folder and it looses the Texture settings and everything.

I tried to move and delete within UE4 then I tried to migrate the content and then delete the original.
I tried to press the Fix Up Redirectors function on the new folder before I deleted the original. Same results.

Do I really have to keep all kind of trash folders within my game if I use items from the marketplace or is there any way to get rid of this issue?

Thanks in advance.

anonymous_user_b4c9ac1d1 · September 12, 2018, 10:43pm

Why are re-directors necessary if I did the rename operation within the Unreal Engine itself? The engine should definitely know where to find the files new location in this case.

Jambax · September 13, 2018, 8:38am

Hell of a bump…

The reason it doesn’t by default is because it would have to find all references to those initial assets and update them as well, which requires resaving. Say a blueprint references a material you want to move, it has to be resaved with the new asset path. You can delete files too, but again you will have to check out all referencing assets to clear those references (usually Unreal will tell you to clear the reference first). You have to fix the references and then fix up redirectors in the case of deletion.

If you’re project uses source control (which most probably are), this means checking out and resaving all those files. This can result in bloating your source control depot. What I would like is a checkbox option to have that be the default behaviour if you don’t care about bloat.

When you move files, right-click the folder and hit ‘Fix Up Redirectors’. This will bring up a dialog box showing all the assets that also need to be saved with new asset paths. This didn’t work for me very well a few years ago when this thread was made, but it works perfectly fine now.

You may have to manually clean up folders in Windows Explorer as the folders are created by the OS, but the redirectors themselves should be gone. Generally speaking, it’s better practice to maintain a good folder structure from the very start of a project so you don’t have to do stuff like this often.