One piece at time, I’m trying to learn something more about pipelines and assets management…
At the moment I’m working on very small scripts, trying to understand what I can achieve and what not, what we need for start and what could be left behind.
Me and another artist (who basically is our principal modeler) spoke a few times and we thought a lot about different options.
I admit I changed a little my opinion on a couple of stuff and I’ll give a try to something else…
Since our primary game engine in Unreal the pipeline is still heavily influenced by it, but I’m trying to keep every door open…
So for now my plan is this:
-
Automated Unreal project creation using a Python script. It will create all needed folder and stuff given a ProjectName. I would like to add here the option to create a P4V depot (or link to an existing one) and a workspace.
-
Folder structure: assets will be stored in 2 mirrored folder structures:a root named AssetsFiles will branch into WorkFiles (containing all DCC sources) and ImportFiles (containing stuff to be imported in engine: no version control for this).
ImportFiles folder structure will be mirrored under Content/ProjectName/ in UE4 -
Precise naming convention. From the ImportFiles down all stuff will be engine-specific, so for UE4 we’ll follow a custom version of epic one and allar’s. We have short prefixes and suffixes insome cases: stuff created by UE4 itself will probably keep their name (for example given SK_Character we’ll keep SK_Character_Skeleton instead of renaming it with _SKEL or something similar)
-
Against my initial “hostility” we’ll try to keep textures,materials and meshes in the same folder. As suggested by @Theodox we’ll leave the idea of “what stuff must always travel together” idea rule on folders… Just try
-
Write a custom exporter for Blender in order to control the fbx production.
It will have some simple features:
1- Option to export all or selected meshes
2- Option to export one fbx file with all meshes inside or multiple ones (one for each mesh in blend scene)
3- It will automatically add prefix to the FBXs, so SM_ for Unreal (I don’t want to force the artist to name stuff for a specific engine: source working file should remain engine-agnostic)
4- When exporting a single fbx it will have the same name of the blend file: when exporting multiple files (like for a “set” of props) the name will be SM_blendFilename_meshName
5- It will save as metadata ArtistName , LastEditDate, SourceFilePath (path to the source .blend file)
This is half done but it completely lacks of any UI: it’s just a script and a bunch of functions -
Write a custom importer for Unreal: this is half done too. It imports stuff in the right folder (creating it if not existing), identify file types and performs simple operations (like changing texture compression based of name suffix
I know these parts are way far from be finished… this is just my starting point!