Best practices for storing source art files

Development Pipeline & Plugins
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1

We’re organizing our Perforce Depot, and we’ve been keeping source art separate from art exported into game-ready formats such as FBX, TGA, etc. Currently, we’re mirroring the folder structure of our development environment in another location. For example, our P4 depot would have these folders:
//SourceArt/Engine/Content
//SourceArt//Content
etc…

And then we have

//dev/Engine/Content
//dev//Content

etc.

Since the editor auto-imports any asset in a game-ready format, it makes me think maybe it’s easier to store source assets in the same location as the game’s content, where it stores .uasset files. so, everything would go under the //dev folders in P4. But it gets tricky with things like .PSD files - since some of those might be ready to go right into the game, whereas others might need to go into another program before being used in the game. That’s an argument in favor of a separate location.

An argument in favor of having source art assets and intermediate asset formats in the same location is that it’s very easy to forget to check in both files into P4 during your workflow. You have to remember to browse to 2 locations and add files, and years of development experience tells me will cause people to forget.

I’d love to know where Epic or anyone else with a lot of development experience puts source Maya files, PSD files, and other various source art assets in their source control.

2

What decision did you come to in the end? Recently hit this problem myself. Currently we have an ArtSource folder with source files, export FBX and PSD to the game content folder, have Unreal submit the .uasset files to Perforce and then manually submit PSD/FBX/etc via p4v.

This means if an artist forgets to manually submit an FBX alongside its .uasset and another artist needs to make an edit, they need to know who created it and what their source file was called - major PITA. And with PSD files it makes absolutely no sense at all since Unreal can generally deal with those directly, but it can’t sub them to p4. :confused:

3

Is there any downside to storing those files in the Content folder with the .uasset files? I often find myself with a duplicated folder structure if I don’t.