Creating & Importing Assets

Apprenez à créer et à importer des ressources personnalisées dans nanos world

Prerequisites

Before proceeding, please make you followed the first steps and installed Unreal Engine and downloaded the Assets Development Kit project.

It is also recommended to have read the Assets Guide to understand some concepts which will be mentioned here.

Getting Started

The first step to start creating your own Assets is opening the ADK project. Once you do that, you will notice we have two folders in the root Content/ directory: NanosWorld/ and MyAssetPack/:

As stated before, do not modify any file inside NanosWorld/ as any change will not be exported neither imported into nanos world.

Organizing your Asset Pack

Then, you can delete or rename MyAssetPack/ to anything you want to be your Asset Pack. All assets you create or import must be contained inside this folder. Feel free to create sub-folders and organize the way you want. But all files must be inside the root Content/MyAssetPack/ folder!

Importing external Assets

You can drag'n drop any file from your computer inside that folder, e.g. FBX meshes or WAV sounds.

The next pages of the docs will have examples on how to import specific assets (Skeletal Meshes, Maps, etc). You can check them and then back here to finish the exportation.

Exportation de vos assets

Après avoir créé vos assets, les exporter depuis Unreal Engine est très facile.

For that, select Platforms ⬇️ Windows/Linux ➡ Cook Content:

Cela lancera le processus d'exportation et d'emballage, qui peut prendre un certain temps selon que les assets ont déjà été chargés ou non. En général, elle est plus longue la première fois.

After finishing, go for the Cooked folder of your ADK project:

assets-development-kit/Saved/Cooked/Windows/NanosWorldADK/Content/MyAssetPack/

You may end up with a folder like that, with all your assets in the cooked version:

attention

Please don't confuse the Cooked assets folder with the ADK project files. Make sure you are in the Saved/Cooked/ one!

After cooking your assets, we will manually copy the cooked folder from it, the one we are looking for is the one you added your assets (MyAssetPack/ in our case). This folder will become our Asset Pack.

Now just copy it into your Server/Assets/ and create a Assets.toml in the root. Please refer to Assets Pack Configuration which you can copy and paste a new version of the file.

After copied, rename your Asset Pack folder to a kebab-case as it's a mandatory standard for nanos world Assets & Packages names.

You will end up with a folder like this:

Assets/
├── my-asset-pack/
│   ├── SM_Cube.uasset
│   ├── SM_Cube.uexp
│   ├── SM_Cube.ubulk
│   ├── SM_Asset_02.uasset
│   ├── ...
│   └── Assets.toml
Config.toml
NanosWorldServer.exe

Configuring your Assets.toml

After you created your Assets.toml in the root folder of your Asset Pack. There are some important configuration to be set.

Open the Asset.toml in a text editor and make sure you configured unreal_folder and unreal_version to the correct values.

# unreal engine configurations
[unreal]
    # unreal engine folder - the name of the root folder (the one inside UnrealProject/Content/) which the assets will have references to each other
    unreal_folder =     "MyAssetPack"
    # unreal engine version - unreal version this asset pack was compiled on
    unreal_version =    "5.0.3"

Another important section to configure is the [assets] one, in which you define the list of exported assets to be referenced through scripting.

For example if you export a StaticMesh SM_Cube in a sub-folder, define them like that in your Assets.toml:

# assets files
[assets]
    # ...

    # static meshes
    [assets.static_meshes]
        # Key = Path
        SM_Cube = "MySubFolder/SM_Cube"
        # ...

This way scripters can spawn your Cube Mesh like that:

Server/Index.lua

Prop(Vector(0, 0, 0), Rotator(0, 0, 0), "my-asset-pack::SM_Cube")

tip

You can use the ADK Assets.toml Generator Tool to generate your Assets.toml automatically!

Final Considerations

attention

After cooking and copying your folder, do not rename or delete any file/folder inside your Asset Pack folder! Cela brisera toutes les références utilisées par vos assets.

Conseils supplémentaires

Name your assets properly

We hardly recommend and encourage you to follow Allar's Asset Naming Conventions as a pattern for naming your assets and organizing your project folder.

We've summarized the most common names here:

Type d'assets	Préfixe	Suffixe
Skeletal Mesh	SK_
Static Mesh	SM_
Physical Asset	PHYS_
Material	M_
Material Instance	MI_
Animation	A_
Animation Montage	A_
Particle	P_
Sound Wave	A_
Sound Cue	A_	_Cue
Texture	T_	_? (see Textures)

Reduce the size of your Assets

Utilisez des assets de petite taille et configurez correctement la compression des textures (les gros fichiers sont mauvais pour la bande passante du réseau). We recommend max 2048x2048 size for textures, as they will be 5MB each.

Creating Assets Thumbnails

It is a good practice to include thumbnails of your assets into a folder called Thumbnails/ in the root of your Asset Pack. This is a convention as the Sandbox game-mode reads from it to display on Spawn Menu. Add .jpg with the name of the assets all in the Thumbnails folder.

You can use the ADK Thumbnail Generator Tool to generate them!

Using Engine Content

Évitez d'utiliser le contenu du moteur (Engine Content) (par ex. Matériaux ou Meshes du moteur). If you want to use them, we recommend copying them to your Content/YourAssetPack/ folder, otherwise they may not be exported correctly.

tip

There are some Engine Content which are allowed to use, but only from the following folders (these are already included by the base game and are safe to use):

• /Engine/Functions
• /Engine/BasicShapes
• /Engine/ArtTools
• /Engine/EngineMaterials