We are at a stage of our project where were are planning to do better management of our source art and how it relates to game assets. As part of this investigation (and frankly, any investigation), it seemed prudent to look into how Epic manages source art on Fortnite as a good baseline. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find any good information on this, so I’m turning EPS. Essentially what I’d like to know is:
- Is Epic using any kind of off-the-shelf DAM solution for Fortnite assets?
- Does Epic validate things like “This exported game asset must not be submitted without the relevant source art?” If so, how?
- Are there any other resources or info you can provide about Epic’s DCC workflows in general, specifically around managing game assets?
Thank you!
Hey there! Off the shelf I believe we’re using Autodesk Flow (formerly) ShotGrid. As far as where the actual DCC files live, they’re in a separate depot from the .uproject although that’s fairly uncommon. Most studios will setup a directory at their P4Root for DCC and intermediate files (eg. “SourceArt”, “Assets”, etc.)
As far as validating the changelist contains both intermediate and .uasset file, you’d be able to use something like a DataValidator to ensure that the uasset’s source file are in the same changelist when the asset is saved. You definitely want to do this in-editor so that you don’t have to worry about running anything on the source control side that won’t be able to crack out a .uasset file.
It’s not going to cover quite everything, but definitely check out Ari’s talk from last year, “Setting Up an Unreal Engine Studio: The Epic Way!”, it’s got a lot of great information on our latest recommendations.
If you’ve got any specific questions I’d be happy to answer those!