Interchange Framework - How to import new or not supported formats?

Development Pipeline & Plugins Plugins
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1

Hello there,

i recently discovered this new Interchange Framework, which seems to be a new way of importing content into Unreal Engine 5. After reading through the manuals, the biggest question i have is:

Will this enable BLUEPRINT ONLY users to create whatever is necessary to import new and not yet supported file formats? Like, can we at some time in the future create our own factories without the need of going through C++?

From my very limited understanding, currently we can “only” alter and redefine pipelines for already supported formats, but i have not found anything about how i could go on about reading a currently completely unsupported format, and then maybe tell Unreal Engine, which part of the file means what and how UE should handle it to make an Asset or Actor from it.

And i don´t mean that for a specific format or having to go through a middleman format like JSON, i mean a general way, that would work for all kinds of formats (if the user knows, how the format is structured etc, aka, there is a manual of what a file looks like and how a program should interpret that data).

It seems like, Blueprint only people cannot create those required factories or link them to Interchange, or is there somewhere documentation about this?

Thanks in advance :slight_smile:

2

Hello,
so interchange is broken in several parts. The main two parts are:

  • translation of external files to interchange nodes.
  • generation of assets from interchange nodes.

With blueprints you can insert custom code to add interchange nodes, modify or remove them as well as modify assets once created.

If you want to make a translator to read a format not supported by UE that will require C++. The good part about interchange is that you do not have to write everything from parsing format to creating assets, you make a translator that parse format and feed the generic and intermediary interchange node level, the call of factories and asset creation should come for free.

There is no documentation on how to build a translator but you could look at the one from glTF or MaterialX to have an idea on how they work.

3

I was afraid, you would say that :sweat_smile: So no way around C++ Is there any chance, that this part might change it the future, so that everything could be done with blueprint?

(For me, C++ is just a cryptic headache, that some old god eldritch horror abomination dropped into this world ^.^)