Best way to handle assets and templates

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

My office has adopted UE4 in our workflow and everything has been great so far except for handling all of our assets and collaborating. I have several questions/problems.

1.One problem is on my personal epic account I have purchased assets from the marketplace by my coworker hasn’t and needs that specific asset. Other than myself installing to the project how can I generate a folder so he can bring it into our project and it can rest on our server? Sharing assets within the office without needing someone else to add something to the file is critical to us.

  1. I have hundreds of models all located across 10 UE4 projects, instead of going into each project and hitting “migrate” for each object is there anyway to have an external content browser that can view other projects assets and when I find what I need it imports? See below comment.

  2. I have been using autocad for 10 years and how we deal with our blocks/assets is we have a source template file that has 1,000s of blocks that is referenced by our tool pallete. For example say i’m drawing a kitchen, i go to my tool pallete, hit the kitchen section and click on the stove top block and it will place it in my drawing using the information from the template file without me needing to go into the template and copying it out. My one concern with this method in Ue4 is that the file itself would be 10’s of gigs and hard to manage/sort through.

  3. Say I add a marketplace item, take the free open world demo which is almost 7 gigs and I just want a piece of grass. I place the grass in my file and I want to purge out any unused assets to keep my file size down, is there a function for that? This gets trickier if I use 10 out of 100 assets and I don’t want to manually delete assets out with the fear of accidentally deleting something that I am using.

5.Currently when we work on a project we make a new UE4 project on our dropbox, so if someone needs to work on the project they have the files downloaded to their hard-drive. Which allows only one person in the file because 2 people will cause a save conflict, can two people work on the same map at the same time? Dropbox has been great so far, its just the syncing sometimes causes conflicts. How do you guys handle collaboration?

How do you guys collaborate with others and assets? This has really been killing our workflow.

2

You should be using version control to handle this.
(from a Subversion PoV)
You would create a repository for all your code and a seperate one for assets(To avoid bloat).
Then each person checks out a working copy and goes from there.
Then your SVN client will be able to tell you when something has been modified and what not.

HTH

3

One way for several people to work on the same level is using the level streaming feature. A single level can then be broken down into smaller pieces and team members can work on their own piece.

4

For 1, just create a new project using the asset and put it on your content server.

5

For 2, you could make a “catalogue project” with all your models and other assets nicely sorted. Maybe with a demo level to easier find what you need.

6

this is a clever way, will try this out.

7

problem with this is my coworker needs me to do this, I want to avoid that all together. My goal is to have my coworker independent so I do not hold them up because I am doing a million other things so to switch to the epic launcher and make a new project and then add all necessary files is inefficient in our workflow.

8

You only need to do it once for each marketplace asset.

9

One thing to remember is that you do not have to use the migrate function. If you got a folder with self contained assets, you can just copy it. If you are not sure it is safer to use migrate, as it will check for dependencies.