Asset management, renaming and manipulation

[Hyperloop]

From a usability perspective, the way Unreal handles moving, organizing and renaming assets is a real rough spot in an otherwise pretty stellar user experience. I’ve recently done some contract work using one of the other popular engines out there and one of the first things I noticed was that it had 100% support for changing and editing the folder structure and asset naming right in the operating system. You can move assets in and out of the project from your file system with ease. You can reorganize and rename folders and assets in windows explorer without restriction and the changes propagate into your project.

Unreal in contrast feels like it has a very brittle set of arcane restrictions in this regard. Manipulating project assets in windows explorer, et. al. is almost never a good idea and the interfaces for doing these common operations in the engine itself feel a bit unpolished and clunky.

I understand to some extent, the technical reasons for this, but I think for users migrating to UE4 this is an area that will really stand out as needing a little bit of love because if you are used to the work flow in ‘that other engine’ you can realllly shoot yourself in the foot right away by trying to do the same thing in Unreal.

The current setup in Unreal is all very workable once you learn it, but from a customer acquisition standpoint it feels like a weakness in a key area.

[BoredEngineer]

Manipulating assets and project files directly from operating system is a straight ticket to ******** up your source control repository.
The thing which is wonky sometimes is renaming assets which creates redirectors and then prevents those assets from being deleted. Not critical but takes some time and attention to fix.

Edit: s.c.r.e.w is apparently a curse word according to forum

[NegInfinity]

@BoredEngineer;443035

Manipulating assets and project files directly from operating system is a straight ticket to ******** up your source control repository.
The thing which is wonky sometimes is renaming assets which creates redirectors and then prevents those assets from being deleted. Not critical but takes some time and attention to fix.

Edit: s.c.r.e.w is apparently a curse word according to forum

This has been discussed before:

Moving / renaming still completey broken in 4.8

[NegInfinity]

@Chariots;443179

Haven’t used Unity in a while, but if you had setup complex relations with asset files, moving those with explorer caused meta files to break and in most cases resulted in reimporting of those files. They even had a warning on their documentation for not moving assets from editor. A way around that was moving the hidden .meta files as well as the assets files (and renaming them if necessary). If you forget to move the .meta files, you mess up Unity as well.

In Unreal I move and rename asset folders a lot, but I do those in the editor. Once that is done, I right click and select fix up redirects on the entire content folder and that solves any reference issues. Editor does leave 1kb redirector files once you move assets, but if you fix up everything, you can safely delete those (they are a safeguard for assets that you haven’t loaded during move, like assets you receive from team members). Whole thing takes less time than Unity’s process (well, Unity 4’s anyway).

Both systems have ups and downs, personally I prefer UE4 way and not mixing up explorer at all during folder management. I’ve been burned multiple times by other devs not moving their .meta files because they are hidden by default, or moving the wrong .meta file creating a clusterF during merges.

I had this discussion before.

Short version of it: For me, moving things around resulted in data loss in UE4 several times. That didn’t ever happen with unity 5.

[F1nik]

Hi there,

This tool (Multi Object Renaming Tool or MORT) will help you to rename actors\objects in the World Outliner and Content Browser:
Multi Objects Renaming Tool in Code Plugins - UE Marketplace](Multi Objects Renaming Tool in Code Plugins - UE Marketplace)

Features:

• Find and replace
• Rename and Numerate
• Prefix
• Suffix

This is the youtube video of MORT:

OLD Multi Objects Renaming Tool for Unreal Engine 4.10 - 4.22

[anonymous_user_759e5c3a]

@BoredEngineer;443035

Manipulating assets and project files directly from operating system is a straight ticket to ******** up your source control repository.
The thing which is wonky sometimes is renaming assets which creates redirectors and then prevents those assets from being deleted. Not critical but takes some time and attention to fix.

Edit: s.c.r.e.w is apparently a curse word according to forum

It was “screwing” but that’s a bit silly because I don’t think saying “screwing up” is that bad. I fixed that.

Thanks for the feedback about the asset management too