Endless 'Importing small assets' problem

I've been having this problem in 2019.1, I haven't tried anything newer but similar threads seem to imply that this is an old problem, I've just never seen a good solution:

I have about a half-dozen trees, speedtrees, in my project on my Terrain. As soon as I start Unity and the project, it's ok, for about a minute. As I click ANYTHING, I'm told to 'wait while importing small assets'. Like ANY menu click, inspector, scene, whatever. Sometimes it takes a few clicks before I get to the actual UI I need. Eventually, it NEVER lets me proceed, always re-importing.
I isolated the trees to another project to see if it would do this, it does not. I've looked at all editor scripts that validate menu items or do an asset database refresh, nothing there.

Has anyone else seen this behavior, and is there a cause, and better, a solution? Short of 'bake them into something else and delete the originals' because that unfortunately is not an option at this time.

 

Sometimes Unity shows a dialog box during import or build process and it goes to background and impossible to see/click it's buttons.I believe you experiencing the same problem because it looks exactly as you described. Do not touch your keyboard / mouse during processes or use build server and asset cache server to avoid those processings on your machine completely is my solution.

 

sure, this is what asset cache server is for. Its easy to setup and you can use a local folder on your desktop, its available from the settings. Otherwise you will reimport every tiny asset every time and it gets tedious.

 

With due respect, no, this was not the problem. I could let it sit for an hour, come back and hit the 'close app' button, and persisted..It turned out that 2019.1 had a bug with SpeedTree files. If I turned them into prefabs and deleted the .st files, the problem stopped.Or if I updated to 2019.2.10 the problem stopped.

 

Hey @AccentDave I'm the Online Product Manager for SpeedTree,

Can I ask which models you're trying to import into 2019.1? I might be able to help out, but I can't make any promises.

 

I'm not sure where they came from, but one was RiverBirch and the other SugarMaple. If I started a new project and brought them in, the first time I did that, the problem was there, but it stopped itself. So I took my project that was having problems and deleted things until that was all that was left. Even deleted the Scenes. I submitted that as a bug report to Unity QA, who said they could not reproduce it in 2019.2, which turned out true for me too. I could not go to 2019.2 on my project because it broke other things and time is of the essence.
Can I send you the files, or do you know which ones I mean?

 

I attempted it with our v8 Sugar Maple model and the v7 and v8 River Birch models in Unity 2019.1.2, as well as 2019.2.11 and was unable to recreate the issue the issue, unfortunately. There's still some stuff we can try though.

I just have a few quick questions that should give me a better idea of what you're seeing on your end:
-Which version of Unity 2019.1 are you using on your end?
-Can you send me the links to the River Birch and Sugar Maple models you're using?
-If your files were purchased from store.speedtree.com, were they exported for Unity in the SpeedTree modeler before attempting to import them to your project?

If you can't find the asset links, just send me a screenshot of the file folders containing the SpeedTree assets and their contents so I can better assess which version they are and whether or not they've been packaged correctly for import.

You can PM me all of this if you'd prefer to keep it private. Get back to me when you can.

 

...have you tried deleting the Library folder?

 

Many times

 

I'll ask the scene designer ASAP where he got them. In my case, it seemed to work if I just copied those assets in to a new empty project. There was something about my project that just didn't like. Could be ShaderForge? Or Curvy? or other 3rd party things? I deleted everything until nothing left but those assets and it still had the problem. I did not delete the library at that point. If you can access the bug report I sent, all the stuff is in it.

 

Do you have anything in the project via the Package Manager?

 

One thing to try is launching the Unity Editor with the -force-d3d11 parameter. Sometimes the bugs in DX12 can cause weird import loops, and -force-d3d11 can help with some issues.

 

Just the package manager itself

 

That's worth a try, thanks
... and yes, so far that's working, THANK YOU!

 

I too am having this exact same issue. Seems to be directly related to Speedtree assets.