An Assets Manager for Unreal Engine is finally here!
An asset manager for Unreal Engine is what many of us were hoping to see and it’s finally here!
As you can guess from the content shown around here, I am doing many creative things, but mainly I am a CG artist developing solutions for companies and brands, bringing them the interaction and the engagement that only videogames-like experiences can bring nowadays. In the last years, I worked under the hood, with a talented group of crazy heads, and we put together, piece by piece, a variety of “digital injections” that can help the interior design market and the fashion market to engage in a whole new way to their customers.
We switched from a pipeline around Autodesk 3D Studio Max and Chaos Group Vray to a complete workflow tied around Epic Games Unreal Engine 4. The interactivity, the quality and the possibilities brought by a game engine are just invaluable.
Having to deal with a lot of products, materials and assets in general what was missing for Unreal was a proper assets manager with which we could manage, categorise and quickly insert things into our scenes. But things are going to change thanks to UMU and their Assets Management Tool for Unreal Engine 4.
EVERYTHING IN ONE PLACE AND READY TO USE INTO UNREAL ENGINE
UMU Assets Management Tool gives you access to thousands of ready to use assets for interior design in Unreal Engine. The software connects to UMU’s servers and their daily updated and fast-growing contents library. With a variety of categories and subcategories to choose from you can quickly locate the assets you need, download them locally and then migrate them directly into your project’s contents folder. The clean interface and the really nice thumbnails make using the assets manager a breathe and a pleasure at the same time.
The pricing model for getting access to the assets, from what I understood until now, ranges between a subscription model that gives you access to a wider variety of assets depending on the kind of rank you are paying for (silver, gold and platinum account for example) and the possibility to buy only specific assets you need for few cents per each.
Every asset is well organized as a unified blueprint making it easy to manage them into the level (and saving some light baking time due to the lower lightmapping resolution of the individual pieces). Early next year it will be also possible to import our own assets into the manager so that we can manage our entire library in the same place.
As you can see from the pictures, the quality of the assets and the results you can get out of the box into Unreal are really good.
UMU is the Chinese company behind this project and currently, the Assets Management Tool is in ongoing beta. You can join the beta and try it out by yourself from the new website they built for all of us that do not understand Chinese.
