I’m working out my art-to-game workflow. Right now I’ve been saving 3d files from Lightwave and other tools in a folder OUTSIDE of the Assets folder, and moving just the finished FBX files into the Assets folder when I’m done.
I am thinking of just saving all my 3d and texture files (tgas, tiffs, and psds) directly into folders that are inside of my assets folder so that I don’t need to move folders, etc.
Anyone know if this is a good idea or not? Pitfalls?
Only downfall is that when you add or change an item in the asset folder, Unity by default reloads them. Upside or downside, depends on how often you edit those files. Upside is, no need to move them, downside is, if you are constantly editing them, you will see Unity constantly reload them. I just keep everything in my asset folder personally.
The good thing is that Unity only reloads them if it understands them. So if you’re editing your Max, Modo, LightWave, etc models Unity won’t reload them.
If it’s something like a big Photoshop file… it will reload it.
Like Zumwalt, I keep everything in my Assets folder regardless, it makes organization much easier despite the reloading.
I’d say that keeping everything in the Unity folder is the way it’s “meant to be”. That things are being immediately reloaded is one of the nice things about Unity’s workflow with assets. You can even change assets while playing in the editor and immediately see the changes.
Of course, if importing an individual asset takes prohibitively long … you need a new Mac
It’s also better because that way, you can easily manage everything with the asset server. Haven’t tried this with files that Unity doesn’t understand, though …
Consider what is useful to Unity and what is not. For example, for my iPhone game, I have Illustrator files which contain the artwork that goes into my textures. For each of those, I need to make Photoshop files, both for having something that can be used in-game, and to make square textures out of images that are not square. It is most organized to keep the .psd’s in the Assets folder, but the .ai files are just clutter there, and I keep them elsewhere, but still in the project folder. That way, they are in a good place on the hard drive, but you won’t need to look at them in Unity.
Also, I make music in Logic, and keep the Logic projects elsewhere in the project folder, too. I typically bounce the Logic music to an audio file, edit it in Soundtrack, and only keep the .aiff result of that in the Assets folder. However, Unity iPhone does not compress files to .m4a format, which I want to use, so in that case, I go Logic → Soundtrack → iTunes (for compression/conversion). Now, I keep the Logic files, and the AIFF files I export from Soundtrack, in other folders, and only keep the compressed music in the Assets folder.
So, if you’re working with files that Unity can actually read, and that will be used in your game, I say keep them in the Assets folder, organized at your discretion. Otherwise, I wouldn’t put them in there. I think you had the right idea originally, only keeping the exported .fbx files in Assets. I do think you should keep your texture files in the Assets folder, though.
Regarding photoshop files: I started saving photoshop files in the Asset folder. These are files that aren’t used in the final gamre. I noticed that Unity imports them anyway when I swtich back to Unity.
My question is: What did that import do? Is it using Editor resources? If I had a ton of these unused images, is the editor going to get slower or use more ram?
We occasionally keep some extra stuff in our Assets folder (and actually in the Asset Server, too). This means that a fresh Asset Server pull of the project includes all relevant source files.
As far as I know, you only use resources upon reimport and for storing the imported version. So the editor shouldn’t get any slower.
And I’m not sure if its been stated in this thread or if its just considered common knowledge, but for the reader: Resources in your assets folder which are not used in your scenes will not be included in your builds.
As I’m not using Asset Server, this is not relevant for me, but I could see that storing code managing files such as TextMate project files or Visual Studio solutions in the Assets folder would make a lot of sense.
