This Lumberyard Batch Importer was created to raise awareness of a shortcoming with batch importing in the Lumberyard Editor and then demonstrate a possible solution to the problem.
In the early releases of Lumberyard before its FBX pipeline was fully realized, there was no easy way to import multiple assets from an external source. For example, if a customer wanted to port their Unity game into Lumberyard, they would spend days importing their FBX assets, importing textures, creating and applying materials. This was a big burden and a possible reason why a team would not want to make the switch.
This tool was created to make that process as simple as possible and dramatically reduce the time it took to get assets into Lumberyard. The tool would import a folder worth of FBX assets (and sub-folders), import the FBX's textures and then ensure proper material creation with the newly imported textures. For simple assets, they imported into Lumberyard seamlessly. For more complicated assets, the import got the asset nearly all the way to completion in Lumberyard, requiring just a small amount of work to clean them up. Regardless, being able to import 80x the amount of assets through this automated tool would be a big win for customers.
This tool was just a prototype and never saw customer usage, but it influenced features in the final implementation of Lumberyard's FBX importer system.
Core Features
- Import folders full of FBX game assets from any location or other game engine, directly into Lumberyard.
- Import associated textures and ensure all materials and texture assets are properly linked to each other.
- Offer a fallback texture source location in case texture files are not where the FBX said it was.
- Support proper scaling of imported assets.