I just recently downloaded UE4 and have migrated my downloaded sample projects to my current project. I’m not an artist/modeler so I’m relying on all of free assets I can get. problem is, when I drop a static mesh into my map, there are no materials applied so all of my objects are grey. I’m sure it’s not too difficult to add corresponding materials to their static mesh, but I’m a little rusty as I’ve been out of game design loop for a while. I have tried dragging and dropping a material onto it’s according static mesh, but result is extremely unsatisfiying. For example: I dropped in one of snow trees from Elemental demo, then went to materials and added a snow_tree material to mesh, but it didn’t align properly at all and just looks like a 2d painting of leaves was slapped on to surface of mesh. How would I go about applying these materials correctly and am I going to have to do this for EVERY single mesh I want to add to my world? If so this is going to be a very tedious process to get me setup. I’m coming from UDK where I could just drag in a static mesh that I wanted and it would have its materials already applied.
Ok last night I tried 3 different methods I’ve been taught on how I can access all of my downloaded sample projects/assets and only one of them resulted in textures/materials staying with their according meshes.
first method I tried ( one I stated in OP) was cutting projects (Elemental and SciFi Hallway) from My Documents>Unreal Projects and pasting them to Unreal Engine>4.2>Engine>Content. Then I went into my projects content browser and checked box that says “Show Engine Content” under view options. This resulted in all meshes losing their materials/textures.
second method I tried was very similar; I cut projects from My Documents>Unreal Projects, but then pasted them into Unreal Engine>4.2>Samples>Content>Sample Content (this file path may not be exact, I’m basing off of memory). When opening a new project I selected “Show Starter Content” and got same result.
third method I tried was migrating assets from sample project to my project. This worked! When I drag meshes in try actually look like how they’re supposed to. My only concern is, I’m not happy with this method. This is going to be way to tedious if I have I do this for every single project I create. I’d like I have all of theses downloaded assets available in my content browser as soon as I open a new project.
Any ideas on a method I can do that while still keeping materials/textures linked to their static meshes?
You describe moving assets between projects, but it sounds like you’re doing it manually. Can you describe your process in a little more detail? My guess is that you’re not aware of Migrate feature, which you can read about here:
You can migrate multiple assets at same time this way, and they will all retain their materials and textures if you maintain same folder structure between projects.
Thanks for your reply! I’m not sure if you noticed, but I added a comment below OP that goes into specific details. I am aware of migrate option, but I am not completely satisfied with this method because it will require me to this every time I start a new project. I would like for all of these assets to be ready in my content browser everytime I open engine. Any other options?
You may have noticed that there is a checkbox in Launcher to Include Starter Content when you create a new project. This pulls from Starter Content folder in your Unreal Engine directory. If you want to have assets included in your new project every time, you can place them in that folder and make sure checkbox is enabled!
folder you’re looking for is C:\Program Files\Unreal Engine\4.2\Samples\StarterContent. You will still need to make sure you have your assets saved in appropriate structure so that references are already in place, and this may involve setting them up in a project first and then copying them to StarterContent folder. You’ll need to do all this manually, but it will allow you to do it once and then have assets in each new project from then on.