Collections like project window

I would love an other view almost the same as the project view but with only references to the project items, That I can sort all I want without affecting how its stored on the disk.

Something like in this mock up I made

 

If I understand correctly, you want to save custom "views" of the project data.

e.g:
- The Cows collection: A subset of all of your 3D models that have cows in them
- The Orange Animals collection: A subset of all of your 3D models that have animals with orange skin or fur in them (can include a subset of cows)
- The Level1Animals: All the animal 3D models you used for your first level.
etc.

Depending on the use, I feel like manually maintaining these "views" would be a pain in the ass (e.g. Every time you import a new cow, you have make sure you add it in Cows).

To mitigate that, would the views be automated ? Like "All 3D models inside this folder that have the name "cow" in them".

If so, then the custom views are pretty much saved search queries. If the search queries of unity were more powerful and could be saved, would that answer your needs ? Or am I misunderstanding what you're asking for?

 

Almost but not exactly like thatL

organise the GUID refereced assets in the collections
yes a smart folder would be one option ( this is the saved search queries )

The main idea is to be able to have your own pallet of assets, independent of where they are stored in the project folder.

- An asset can only be one time in the project folder, in the collection view you can have an asset reference in different folders.

- Other downside of the project view is that when you move an asset a recompile is triggered.
- When you delete an asset in the collections its not deleted on the disk.

This makes it saver for level designers to work on a project, they cannot mess something up in the project view which is directly on the disk and does not even support undo.

- It would have this function to drag to the hierarchy, but also from the hierarchy

- the same for the project browser, you could add assets from there to the collections

and you don't have to organise the files in the project view
you just organise the referenced assets in the collections

updating assets from the store won't interfere with your collections view.

 

Can't say I'm a huge fan of that workflow.

Unreal Engine sort of works like that where the disk is not necessarily identical to your project view and I absolutely despised that. It made data maintenance much harder when outside of the engine.

For example, the perforce repo was super disorganized. The on-disk files hadn't been cleaned and maintained like the assets seen in the engine.

I could see the benefits of saved search queries (potentially complex queries like SQL), but I'm not sure I like the idea of using that for data maintenance (creating / moving / deleting assets)

 

The project view is not going away. it's another tool to work in a way you want
And what do you think the hierarchy does? nothing related to the disk.
I understand your concern, but are you organising all the assets you bought from the store or do you leave them as they come into the assets folder?

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/utilities/the-shelf-2904

Basically is this tool but with thumbnail view for visual asset overview

Once you worked with this you will maybe start to see the benefits.

It's like a bridge between the project view and the hierarchy view.

 

My team has a very similar idea and would love something like this provided. Our main reason would be that different disciplines have different requirements for how they like their content organized. There’s no one fits all solution, so we would also propose letting Unity handle the file system and place files optimally for engine needs and then provide virtualized views for different users. We almost never use the physical file system outside of Unity anyway.

 

Exactly what we did.

 

That looks awesome!
Can I try it out?

 

Sadly, as most of our tools, they are all dependent on a series of "code-tools", such as the dragable separator.
While it makes my life a lot easier, it makes packaging tools a lot harder.

 

Where and how do you define what's in the City_Misc view?

 

+ button to create a new collection.
Folder button to create a new folder inside a collection or another folder.
Drag the prefab or asset it in a folder or collection, press Delete to remove the asset from the collection.
Replace button replace the Scene selection (keeping position, rotation and scale) with the currently selected Prefab.

 

It exactly the way I would imagine it!

You would make many peoples lives easier if you could somehow find a way to release the tool.

 

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/utilities/smart-library-200724

Smart Library is available on the asset-store and does exactly what I had in mind

 

Glad someone took interest in creating something like this. Although we are all looking for something pretty much like Smart Library but official and built-in, especially the query feature to set up rules to automatically detect assets.

I'll definitely be checking this out but also hoping there's a proper tool developed for this at some point. Search was definitely the foundation for something like this, even Smart Library is built upon it.

 

Here's something that could act as a potential foundation if you wanted to build this tool yourself: https://github.com/joshcamas/prefab-library