I’d LOVE to see UE4 get “fly-out” panels for things in the editor…in particular the Mesh, Material, Texture, etc. stuff. Right now, if I’m in the Content Browser and looking for some kind of ‘brick texture’ to put on a wall, I have only that little bit of window space to see maybe two decent size thumbnails at a time. I have to drag the CB window panel to the right, shrinking my 3D Viewport. Then find a texture, choose it, and re-size everything back to what it was. This is very time consuming when doing it all the time looking for meshes, texures, materials, etc.
So, what I’m suggesting, is that UE4 implement something akin to what ZBrush has for their Brush selection. Basically, there is a single thumbnail for whatever brush you have selected. If you click on it, a big fly-out window shows up over (mostly) your whole screen, showing all the available Brushes you can choose from. Pick on and the fly-out disappears and away you go. No muss, no fuss.
I’d LOVE to be able to just click on “Materials” and have a big flyout of my materials cover most of my screen…or a fly-out that has my own custom folders like “Rock”, “Brick”, “GroundCover”, “Plastic”, “Metals”, etc…and clicking on one of those changes it all to my selections in that folder. I click on, the flyout dissappears and I can immediately get back to work.
I hope I explained that clearly enough. If not, I’ll try and do better and maybe work up some sort of video to describe it.
This does seem like a cool idea and I see the appeal, but we do however have a lot of ways to filter and change the ‘View Type’ and ‘Scale’ of your thumbnails within the ‘Content Browser’. Even if on a single screen, you can get the sizes of your thumbnails pretty large and still manage to see multiple assets as the same time. Below is an example of thumbnail differences and filters being applied to allow for quick selection of your assets. The easiest way I have discovered to filter through assets is to use a literal ‘Filter’ and click on the main ‘Content’ folder. Then type any key words into the search field and it will quickly find the asset.
We do appreciate you taking the time to enter a feature request and the suggestion is not entirely out of the realm of possibilities, but I do see potential issues with this flyout menu causing problems with the Content Browser and editor’s performance. Especially if there are a lot of assets in a particular folder and it needs to load each thumbnail quickly.
Also important to note is that you can actually summon up to 4 copies of the content browser, using the Window…Content Browser submenu. I frequently keep the one docked in the main frame fairly small, but then open another one as a full screen on my second monitor when I’m scanning thru or organizing assets.
