Hi, just getting into UE5 and was wondering what some of the best project file management practices are that people use? I’m using UE for production / 3D animation purely, so had to get used to the concept of levels, maps, etc.
Should I be saving “levels” out separately for each angle I want to work on? In some cases the environment looks better with a few things turned off at one angle, vs another shot where certain objects on looks fine, so I’ll save Level V1 and Level V2. I also tend to tweak lighting iterations a lot so I’ll save lots of versions of same scene with completely different lighting parameters. Does re-saving this level thing waste an enormous amount of disk space vs some other way people manage their levels or project files with?
Hey there @WHOBASTANK3000! Welcome to the community! That is a name I haven’t heard since the late 90s!
So for animation, I wouldn’t recommend saving out extra levels for just different shot angles. If you are using 5.1 you can have folders inside your outliner and disable/enable whatever you want to see while you’re setting up your scenes. However, I would still use Layers (if you’re using world composition) or Data layers if using World Partition to sort what you want on the fly. Data layers are a bit overkill for animation, but they are ingrained in my workflow at this point. If storage space isn’t a problem and you don’t back your project up frequently you could continue using levels, as they are a clear delimiter but as you guessed they are lots of redundant information in that you could just hide/disable whatever you’re not using in between!
Thanks for the reply haha, I figured as much. Following off of this vid, when you “convert” the level to a World Partition in order to use data layers, is there anything you can’t do anymore conventionally pre-convert like camera animation keying, bokeh, post effects, lighting adjustments, character insertion, adding / changing textures, etc - is it basically baking the scene? Unreal Engine 5 Tutorial - Data Layers - YouTube
I would recommend if you are on world composition, stick with it just because the layer system is integrated with the rendering suite while I don’t believe data layers have the same functionality (while very similar). I had to do a bit more research on it this morning to verify that.