Cloning project auto-reimports assets and breaks light maps

Development Asset Creation
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1

Using binary version of 4.7.4

So I cloned a project in the Epic Games Launcher in order to test some new code. Upon opening the new project for the first time, the popup message came up that it was reimporting 60 of my assets. Seems a little unnecessary, but I keep a lot of my source FBXs in my content folder and I’m guessing it is detecting that their “date modified” value has changed. No big deal, except that reimporting a mesh resets its light maps and now I’d have to perform a several-hour build to get back to where I was. And now as I’m typing, Unreal is autosaving all 60 of those assets, which is taking a couple minutes. I feel like there should be something implemented so that it won’t reimport assets that haven’t truly been updated.

To test this, you should have a project directory that contains source files of assets, and a scene with built lighting on those assets. Then clone the project and open it.

2

Hey, just to let you know that we have some improvements coming in 4.9 that include storing the MD5 of source files imported into assets. This means we can properly detect that an imported source file has not actually changed, and hence ignore it for auto-reimport if its timestamp changes.