I am trying to bring some order to a studio with a desperate need for both directory structure and asset file naming conventions. We have a unique issue of needing to share as many assets as possible between Unity and Unreal. I have been trolling various sites and combining that with my experience to come up with what I believe will bring order to our chaos.
What I am asking here is what is your experiences and what may be some limitations to doing this that I may not have considered given your circumstances?
I don’t want too long or overly complicated names but have found in my experience that directory structures change too many times during production to have very complicated and deep directories. Also is there any max length issues to consider for either engine that sending a full path to would choke?
thanks in advance,
MO
One thing you really need to watch out for if you’re dealing with UE and Unity at the same time is casing: Unity has Mac roots, so it generates asset GUIDs using the casing of the file path where the asset lives. Unfortunately that means that
Assets/a/b/c.fbx and Assets/A/B/C.fbx will generate different guids. You can minimize the pain by trying to keep the whole hierarchy in consistent casing (although Unity also expects script files to follow C# casing rules - so you can’t just cut the knot and decree ‘everything lower case’ which is what I’d do if I could).
Unity, at least, has a decent asset tagging system – so you can rely less on folders for ‘where is that chair’ kind of questions and use the built in search function.
We don’t share stuff, but we do keep our source assets outside of Unity and export them (via fbx or png) from our sour folder to a corresponding location in Unitys /Assets/ folder. If an an asset has to move we move both the source and the target together so the two trees are always in sync. I also stuff ‘just in case’ metadata into the fbxs in case the link between source and asset somehow gets lost; but so far that has not been needed.
from the shameless plug department : there’s a long discussion of different naming / folder strategies in the book I worked on Amazon.com
I’ve made a write-up on this topic, maybe it could help you in discovering what works for you.
Edit: Sorry, just noticed their formatting has gone off slightly. I blame Wordpress.