Art Pipeline setup based on Mike Erwin's Blender + Unreal Asset Pipeline Foundations talk at Blender Conference 2019.
There are 3 top level repository folders:
- Art
- Inter
- Game
Art contains all original art sources (Blender, Maya, Houdini, Photoshop, etc).
Inter contains all exported art files that can be imported by the game engine (FBX, glTF, OBJ, etc).
Game contains everything you need to run the game. In UE4 the imported assets will be .uasset files.
An artist checks out Art and Inter from source control. Original files are stored in Art. When the artist is ready, they export their files to Inter as an FBX, glTF, OBJ, etc and submit them to source control.
A level designer checks out Inter and Game. When they are ready to use an asset an artist has added to Inter, they import the asset into UE4 and it becomes a .uasset. This .uasset is also submitted to source control.
If an artist updates one of the files in Inter, the level designer can right click on the corresponding .uasset in the UE4 Content Browser and select Reimport. They do not need to navigate to the folder again since UE4 stores relative paths to the imported assets.
In order for Reimport to work across multiple checkouts without having to manually find files all the time, the Data Source Folder Editor Preference must be set to the Inter folder by all users. You can find this preference in Editor Preferences > General > Miscellaneous > Data Source Folder. If a level designer forgets to set the Data Source Folder preference and imports a file, that file will have an incorrect relative path that will most likely not work on other user's checkouts.
However, if Data Source Folder is set, the Auto-Reimport feature will not work properly as of UE 4.23.1 and 4.24 preview 1. This issue is fixed by PR 6359.
A programmer only needs to check out Game, which contains all files necessary to play the UE4 game.