ArchViz: Healthy workflow and datasmith reimport issues

Hello there!

I am trying to put together a healthy and fast workflow that will keep my process more stable because of the multiple crashes of the program but also the speed needed in general to produce images in the architecture industry. To be more precise, I am working on a project for which quite often, Unreal Editor crashes (it can be for various reasons - now I try underclocking and it helps until a certain degree). Of course, at every reimport or restart of the project, many of the attributed textures are not anymore in their place and I need to lose a lot of time on replacing these manually on the model

I am wondering if there is any sort of file that could keep a set of all the assets and textures together (based on some of their proprieties, for example: all walls with this name get automatically x brick texture, all slabs with name x get this texture etc) and then apply it to the reimported model, without taking from scratch the whole process every little time. Also, any tips on improving the general workflow for these sort of projects, is more than welcome.

Thank you a lot for your understanding

Materials are applied automatically if you set the exact same name in 3ds max. This is for FBX files. I’m not sure if this works with datasmith as well. Worth a try.
There are backup copies for assets and levels in your project file’s ‘saved’ folder. In case of a crash.

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You should look into that.
You could make recipes to process data on import and do things such as material replacement.

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Dataprep is definitely the feature for this. I wanted to chime in here and share a tutorial I wrote that explains some Dataprep concepts and also shows how you can theoretically automate the whole process without opening your editor for each reimport.

  1. The Export Unreal Datasmith Options dialog box opens; select the geometry quality for the export.
  2. Specify the file name and destination.