I’d love to be able to create a single vault of assets to be pulled from and used in any project.
Migrating assets on a project by project basis is a real pain and makes organizing large libraries of assets very difficult.
Theres always assets that I create that would be useful on other projects. And rarther than try to remember which project has a particular tree in it and migrate it, I’d like to search the vault to see all my trees.
may already be possible but I’m struggling to locate how.
I could add all the assets to the starter content but that seems a little extreme yo load all your assets every time you start a project.
Raises hand and seconds ! I know it has been talked about somewhere in the distant past, like nine, ten months ago, and something about breaking references (?) prevents it. But sure sounds like a good idea to me.
Version 4.7 will have the ability to add in your own content packs. Right now it is a bit difficult to set up, but I am sure they will be adding in a more streamlined way to create the content packs soon.
Here is the post by Marc Audy replying to my question on how to create the content packs:
No promises here, but I am thinking of throwing together a quick little app that will let you select the files you want and then run the command line script. It should be pretty simple to create and would make a much simpler process, I’ll let you know if it works out.
Content packs sound like a step in the right direction, however you still need to add a whole content pack to your project or create a pack for each individual asset.
When importing assets could UE4 not create a reference to the original and work from that?
When it comes time to compile and build your project, only the referenced assets used would be ‘hard copied’ to the project.
Putting something into practice is naturally a lot harder than it is to request, but I really think would improve the UE4 workflow considerably.
Then what I do is create a “_SharedUE4” or “_GlobalAssets” folder (even works on a separate hard drive), then right click that -> Pick Link Source -> in my individual projects that I want to load all of these assets, /Content/ -> Paste As Junction. I can then rename the ‘shortcut’ too if I want.
Now I can access the shared assets as long as I only have one project saving the assets at once. It simply maps the folder like a shortcut, but at the OS level before the hard drive notices!
I’ve never had any bugs since the redirection is cleanly done at OS level. Thanks Microsoft.
The only problem - I would advise not to make too many. Because you can quickly lose track of where all the shortcuts actually go, making it weird for backing up your data since Junctions aren’t preserved within your backup folder(s).
