I’m a professor at a college and have a class in the fall that I’m redesigning, doing my best to make it more relative to real game production. The class is specifically around modeling and I want to state that we are not trying to create a playable game. What I would like to have the students do is create tiles for a game that will all end up in the same level.
Let me try and explain with some examples.
Lets say each student is responsible for creating a tile, or a chunk of the level. A tile would consist of the ground at a specific length and width, castle, trees, road, and anything else that they might add. Each tile would be designed so that it could fit against any other tile that is created by other students.
Workflow so far would be, Max, ZBrush, Substance, PS (Choose your poison). Export to UE4 and build a tile from assets created, texture, collision objects…
Now here is where it becomes an issue for me. I will not have access to source control of any kind at this point in time so that can’t be part of the solution. I want to be able to take each of the students tiles and build a level from them. I do not want to have to import individual assets from each tile and rebuild the tile but instead I want to be able to take the entire tile from each student and build a level. Each tile needs to retain all shaders, collision objects, blueprints and anything else added to that tile.
Things I have tried.
In the Content Browser right click on assets and choose Asset Actions/Migrate.
Pros: Students are responsible for pushing their work to the final level.
Cons: Each asset is sent and the tile needs to be rebuilt. This is not a working solution to the problem.
Select all the assets and Merge them into a single Static Mesh and then Migrate.
Pros: It works and students can send the final tile as a piece that can be placed in the final level.
Cons: All instancing, hierarchies, blueprints are lost and again it isn’t a working solution.
So the question is, what is the best way to go about this?