UE5 has a new feature where if you rename an fbx file, the uasset will be renamed as well to match. That sounds like a great feature, but in my case it causes absolute nightmares so i was wondering if there’s a way to turn it off? If not it’d have to be bugreported. Here’s why:
In modo, when you overwrite an fbx, it :
1 : renames the original mesh to _tmp.fbx
2 : writes out new fbx
3 : if no errors occurred, it deletes the tmp file.
it obviously does this as a safe way to save out a file, so that if the app crashes during save, you won’t lose your last file. The issue with unreal is that for every half dozen times i save over an fbx (which i do all day because i constantly have to update my meshes and see the changes in the editor to see things that you just can’t see in modo (like how the special shader looks with THESE vertex colors applied) ), it will have had enough time by random chance to see that the fbx file was renamed before it was overwritten and now it has:
a : renamed the uasset to _tmp
b : changed the filepath of the source asset to _tmp.fbx
both of which are a nightmare, because now when i save the mesh again and reimport it, it fails because the uasset is pointing to a nonexistent tmp file. Also, if i try to fix it by renaming the uasset back to it’s correct name, that doesn’t work either because the file already exists (in a redirector ghost state used for renamed uassets) and thus it says the filename is already claimed and so i can’t rename it back to it’s correct name.
so to really fix it, i have to:
1 - fix up redirectors on the folder (which you oftentimes can’t because some OTHER files will also get redirect-fixed, but they can’t because the uassets are placed in maps that are currently checked out by other people in the team and you must have access to all the maps that these assets are in)
2 - then fix uasset name
3 - then fix fbx file path
4 - then reimport mesh
so as you can see, not only is it a LOT of work to fix something that can happen many times a day just by doing a lot of fbx saves, but it’s often impossible until you tell the whole team to stop work, check everything in, then fix redirectors, etc etc which you can’t truly do.
also, maybe one reason why i see this bug more often than other folks is that i have the auto reimport feature on. which is a must have, for all the countless assets in random dirs that i work on every day.