Tutorial 4 - Custom Assets

Prerequisites

• You should ensure you are familiar with creating and editing procedures and placing assets by following the First Asset tutorial.

Primary Goals

• Resource List editing
  • Adding a Resource Folder
  • Adding a Resource Reference
  • Naming Resources
  • Setting a Resource Reference
• Referencing Resources from procedures

Secondary Goals

• Duplicating procedural entities
• Groundwork for the Basic Iteration tutorial.

Instructions

Setting up a new asset reference

1. Navigate to the root Resource List
   • You can check Project settings for this
   • This tutorial will assume you have the project set up using the automatic configuration of the Setup Wizard.
   • This will mean Apparance/ProjectResources is the root Resource List
2. Open ProjectResources by LMBdouble clicking on it.
3. Select the Project root folder.
4. Add a new Resource Folder using the +FolderAdd Folder button.
   1. Expand the root folder by clicking on the ►hierarchy arrow or LMBdouble clicking on the name so you can see the new folder.
   2. Select and then rename the folder to "Test" by pressing F2Rename.
5. Add a new Resource Reference to the folder by pressing the +ResourceAdd Resource button.
   1. Expand the new folder as before so you can see the new entry.
   2. Again, select, and then rename it, to "Cube" this time.
6. Browse for an asset to use, either by:
   1. Click the Asset Pickicon in the Asset column.
   2. Click the Asset drop-down in the details panel.
   3. Use a Content Browser window.
      

      You will need to make sure Engine Content is visible by enabling it in the View Options of the picker (at the bottom-right of the picker or Content Browser)

You should have something like this so far:

Cube static mesh asset reference added to the project resource list

7. Find an asset called SM_Cube_01 (in the engine VREditor included with the Unreal)
8. Save the Resource List by clicking the Savetoolbar button.

You can use additional separate Resource List assets to organise your asset references into separate 'libraries' of assets for procedural use. You will need to make sure any new ones are added to the References section in the root Resource List for Apparance to be able to find them. You can in turn reference other lists from your new lists, building up a hierarchy of lists.

Using the new asset reference

1. Open the Apparance Editor (Apparance → Open Editor)
2. Create a new procedure called "Shiny Cube" in the "Test" category.
3. Add Resource Resolve and Place operators and wire them up like in the First Asset tutorial.
4. Set the Descriptor input of the Resolve operator to "Project.Test.Cube" so it refers to the entry you created above with a dot separated path that follows the folder/asset hierarchy in the Resource List.

Placing multiple actors

1. Back in Unreal, drag out a new Apparance Entity actor
2. Set it to use the Test.Shiny Cube procedure.
3. Duplicate the actor, by either:
   1. Selecting Duplicatefrom the Edit menu
   2. Pressing Ctrl+W
   3. Holding Alt whilst dragging the transform widget.

Results

Output

Custom assets placed in Unreal

Procedure

Your procedure should look something like this:

The shiny cube procedure

Next Steps

This tutorial has set the groundwork for the following Basic Iteration tutorial that you may want to follow next.