I work at an industrial design company where we have a few specialized visualization people who use 3D Studio Max and Blender, and then we have a lot of designers and engineers who use Keyshot.
We also have one lonely guy who sometimes have to put things into VR and then use Unreal. Hello, btw.
Recently, I demonstrated Lumen to everyone and it was apparently impressive enough that some people wanted to start using it right away… however, the UI of Unreal was scary enough that this fell apart rather rapidly.
But, this thread isn’t about that.
The most important hurdle to using Unreal (apart from everyone having to create their own user, but this thread isn’t about that either) is that projects need to reside on local drive and everyone working on it have their own local copy.
This is unique to Unreal and uniquely bad!
3D Studio Max doesn’t work like that. All files reside on the network share and you work from there. Same with Blender and Keyshot, with the added benefit that both of those software packages support material and asset libraries also located on that network share, so the individual “project” are not only never on a user’s local drive, but they’re also really small.
Even a small project in Unreal is in the gigabytes of size.
So, enter “virtual assets”. It all seemed fine and dandy, with the “derived data cache” seemingly exactly what we’re looking for (why can’t they just call it asset library like everyone else, but I know, nothing in Unreal is easy). Until I read that one fateful word in the middle of that page:
Perforce.
Oh, noooo! Why is that a requirment? Perforce is the work of the devil, and warps the minds and souls of anyone who uses it! A few years ago, I tried to get it working and failed. Our IT staff at the time tried to get it working and failed. Heck, I got in contact with Perforce support and they couldn’t get it working either. And I know that even if we got it working, that piece of software is even less made for a regular human than Unreal!
Yes, yes. I hear you. Then don’t use Unreal you say. It’s not made to do what I’m asking for.
Well, if there’s even a tiny chance that someone from Epic reads this and it may influence the course of Unreal in a small way, it was worth it. Perhaps even someone will read this who is in a similar situation as me and have found some nifty workarounds, who knows?
PS. This is apparently so new and in beta that there’s not even a tag for it on this forum…