I noticed that when you import a .udatasmith file, you get TWO folders. One of these is called somethingSomething_Assets and seemingly contains duplicates of what’s in the original import folder (with slight differences).
Why is this? Is there a webinar that explains this?
Also, when I delete an import, even though I use “force delete”, that folder never disappears in the Unreal Editor. I need to close the editor and instead launch File Explorer and delete it from there (where I also see a hidden .uasset file which the Unreal Editor doesn’t show me).
EDIT: Similar with Materials, there’s a “Master” material folder with duplicates of materials. Super confusing. Why does Datasmith import two of almost everything?
EDIT: I guess my ocd kicks in here, because this a bit ridiculous and very messy (something that I think permeates the entire UI of Unreal, though).
It looks like you are exporting a datasmith file in your unreal project. I would not recommend it. Export in a side car directory, then import the datasmith file in unreal. Merging both folder structures will most likely create confusion like this.
Oh, I see what you are saying now. I come from Unity, so that is what got me confused, because in Unity, we always put the assets we want to import in our project in the project file hierarchy. Also, Unreal automatically asked if I wanted to import the datasmith file when I did that, and it worked, so I assumed that this was the correct procedure in Unreal as well.
But this still means that I end up with duplicates of a lot of files. Why did you choose to do it this way? What is the benefit from me being forced to have essentially triple sets of all my files?
This will clutter our company network share and the duplicates will not make my boss happy.
Why isn’t the .udatasmith file simply a zip of both the file and the _Asset folder?
I know the video here was created before Datasmith, but it also says that copying non-UE files straight into the UE project directory is fine (lesson 3.1):
But not only that, this also speaks again to my .udatasmithbundle zip suggestion, because the 3.1 video clearly shows that a pasted file doesn’t show up as a duplicate in UE, while a datasmith export (with its generated subfolders) currently do. Again, it’s a bit annoying to have to have UE files on the network outside of the source controlled UE project folders, and again, seemingly unnecessarily get your texture disk space requirements doubled.
Zipping will change possibly size, but slow down export and import. As for “wasted” space, this data is not always a copy. For example, some images are resized and reformatted from 3ds max (power of 2, resolution, file format) so there is no easy solution here.
