Shared Library Project - Team Use
Our small team is currently evaluation the use of dash, primarily delving into the use of the dash content browser and external project library feature as an effective way of allowing our extensive asset library to be available in new projects.
We have created a UE project that only contains our library with a well organised folder structure and assets. We computed the assets and specified materials to be computed as well. This library is connected to a perforce depot to allow it to be synced and shared, currently this is most common way to do this with UE projects.
However, the limitation we have found is, once each artist gets the latest sync of this depot stream, each individually needs to regularly open the library project, compute the assets, waste valuable resources and credits on assets that were already computed and tagged.
Currently from my understanding the computed data resides in the artists local documents polygonflow folder.
I might be wrong but the current implementation of external project libraries was not designed with multiple artist in mind, however I'm really open to discuss with the dash team ways of extending this feature to cover this use case, and provide more in depth feedback on what types of features one might need in this scenario.
Designed connected - Connector software has this shared asset library at its core, incorporating a hybrid dam, accounts with different user permissions which is quite a large feature request to implement in dash. However, perhaps there is a simpler implementation of this feature in a more basic form, perhaps allowing the polygonflow data to be able to be located in local network location that all artists can reference to, or possibly in a s3 bucket or other cloud storage.
I think this feature of dash could become a very important one for teams going forward.
There is a lot more I could say on this. i.e: easily sending assets in a project back to the main library project with automatic computing.
3 Replies
Hey @Marcel SF, thanks for reaching out, and coming with detailed info on your suggestion/request 🙏
I am quite sure we already have a way to prevent the artists from needing to compute the assets again. It is about making sure the right folder/cache is synced between your team members.
But I am adding @Costantino to our convo here to make sure you get the best possible help🙌
Hi @Daniel - COO Thanks for your prompt reply.
If I may add another comment, I'm not sure if once I get more info on how to sync the computed data this question might be resolved.
I see custom tags for assets are added to a separate CustomAssetData.json file and not consolidated in the individual asset metadata.json file. It would be ideal if custom tags users added would be shared amongst all the team, however I presume this is going to be an issue, without a centralised place to store and compute assets and manage updates to them, these json files will likely be overwritten if users add tags without syncing first.
Perforce might be a solution to manage updates to the cached json files however it would be quite a manual process to keep the library updated as files would have to be diffed
Hello,
You should be able to have the unreal project, and computed assets data, in a centralized location, with artists reading from the same folder at the same time, or having it in a perforce repository that can be pulled when needed (alongside the actual project data)
The custom tags format is a bit of a problem right now, but it can be patched for your team quite easily, although, we are looking to make it more flexible in the next releases.
Once the data of the "Asset Project" is computed and ready, it can be added in any other unreal project by picking the path from the external projects preferences like in the picture.
The only problem that can happen with this approach, is a path mismatch from the computed data.
Example:
- The location of "Project Asset" at the time of compute is "C:/UnrealProjects/ProjectAsset"
- The location of the project, either centralized, or remapped from perforce is "G:/PerforceStuff/ProjectAsset"
If this is the case, we can roll out a patch for your team too.
Regarding making the library more team friendly, we are happy to hear any request and do our best to make it happen 🙂
