I have seen this post which suggests that there is a Fab plugin in Unreal Engine 5.6. I am using unreal engine 5.6 and when I open the plugins list, there is no Fab plugin.
I am working on Linux and not using the Epic Games Launcher. I don’t want to.
I prefer working with raw code, my project builds using CMake, and I almost never start the Editor. It would be great if there was a command line option to download the package from my library in Fab, open it, and extract just the assets I want, rather than 200+ assets from a pack. Or even do the download in my web browser or something.
At worst, I am happy to click some menu options in Unreal Editor and then close it, and use basic file system access to cherry pick the assets I want.
However, currently it seems that there is absolutely NO way to get assets from Fab onto my PC.
Internet search found the initial Fab website which was very enthusiastic about how wonderful it was, while offering zero help on how to use it. I found the asset search page more by accident than on purpose. Yet another useless website.
The “Window” menu has a “Get Content” section under the “Log” section. There is a screenshot. In my Unreal Editor, the “Get Content” section is completely missing.
The Edit→Plugins menu option opens a window where you can search for the Fab plugin. There is a screenshot. In my Unreal Editor, there is no plugin named Fab.
That article is in the Unreal Editor 5.7 documentation. I have Unreal Editor 5.6. Is it really so different? I don’t think so.
I think that there is something that all these articles and forum posts are failing to mention: Fab is only available for Windows. I will have to dig out my Windows laptop and check this. But seriously, WTF? What is the point of having a cross platform graphics engine with a cross platform editor and cross platform build tools, and then make asset import restricted to Windows!!
This link pointed me here where I can download the Fab plugin for Linux. The documentation referenced in my previous post says it is automatically installed, but it is not.
Unzip the file in the top level Unreal Editor directory. The contents are automatically put in Engine/Plugins/Fab.
The plugin doesn’t work. When I open the window from the “Window” menu I just get an “in progress” indicator. For ages. I closed the window and then clicked the “Fab” button next to the “Save All” button in the panel at the bottom. The Fab window opened again, and this time I had the error “Failed to load URL https://www.fab.com/plugin/ue5 with error ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED (-105)”.
When I put that URL into my web browser I get what looks like a 404 page.
Update my Windows laptop to Windows 11, and update Unreal Editor to get it working.
Run Unreal Editor and create a dummy project.
Use the Fab plugin to import the pack(s) from my library.
Copy the relevant folders under “Content” to my network attached storage.
Copy just the files for the assets I want into the correct locations in my project. Opening the each file and searching for a relevant keyword from the path helps me to identify all the dependencies.
Run Unreal Editor on Linux, open my project.
Fix all broken references in the textures by opening them one by one and re-saving them.
Fix all broken references in materials and material instances by opening them one by one and updating all the textures and other references.
Fix all broken references in everything else by….you get it.
The alternative from step 5 onwards would be to copy the whole pack somewhere on my Linux machine and import en-masse, move all the relevant assets to the correct location using Unreal Editor, and then delete the pack again. This appears to automatically update the references. Unfortunately while the starter content is browseable and can be used in this way, I cannot get my Fab content to be browseable like this.
This is a major pain. What a crock of ■■■■.
I also don’t like the fact that I need to download a whole pack of 150+ assets just to use a few of them.
Or easy answer is, even if you really don’t like it, just use Windows for convenience till Linux support gets better (hopefully). That’s what I’m doing even though I still would like to use Linux… honestly, I might just setup a dual boot eventually.
