Sharing assets across projects

I'm looking for any advice the Unity community can share with me on my project's structure. The problem we are facing is that we have a large amount of assets in each of our scenes, resulting in a build that sits around 2GB. A large amount of this space is a result of each level containing roughly the same models/textures. So we would like to have only one copy of each of those assets in our project, instead of one per scene. The only way I can conceive of this is to use an assetbundle and load our models dynamically. Apart from the problems that introduces in terms of world building for the artists, we have some issues such as how do you apply a lightmap or occlusion bake to a building or statue that is dynamically loaded from an assetbundle. So before we move further along the path of using assetbundles, could someone sanity check our basic assumptions or bring up any other techniques that we're not seeing.

In addition to the duplication of assets between scenes in this one project, there will be around 15-40% overlap in assets between this first project and our subsequent projects that will all be distributed together. So being able to have one and only one copy of our assets could prove to be a large savings in file size, assuming of course everything "just works" and doesn't cause massive problems on the production side.

Thoughts? Ideas?

 

It's certainly possible to reuse the same 3d model across many scenes. If for some reason you can't do that, there must be something wrong. A scene only has a "link" to the asset in your assets folder and thus its possible for one 3d model/prefab to be used in many scenes.

Ergo, one texture can be reused across many 3d models/prefabs, so the same goes for textures: they can be reused across many scenes.

If you could show a screenshot of how things look like we may be able to help better.

 

I know that is is possible to reuse an asset across scenes, that is the whole point of a prefab. What is not easy to do is to reuse assets across scenes and not have that inflate the build size.

 

Unity automatically pack the asset , so that every asset is only existing one in the project.
If an asset's are used in more then one scene it will be packed as an extra container , so both scene can load the same packet.

That way the build size does not increase if you reuse assets's . (That does not only work for prefabs but for all assets)

 

Sorry I don't follow your logic. They are reused, not copied. So why would reusing inflate the build size? It doesn't store duplicate copies of the 3d files when they are reused on many scenes. As I said, the ones in your scene is just a "link" to that single 3d file, in layman's terms.



If you're worried about your build size, you can check a breakdown of what files are in your build and how much space each takes.

To do so, build your game to the target platform. Then go to your console window (shift ctrl C). In there you will see a button called "Open Editor Log" click it and you'll see a text file get opened (probably in Notepad).

Search through that and a part of that log file will be a breakdown of build size. It goes something like this:

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. Textures      196.4 kb   3.4%
3. Meshes        0.0 kb     0.0%
4. Animations    0.0 kb     0.0%
5. Sounds        0.0 kb     0.0%
6. Shaders       0.0 kb     0.0%
7. Other Assets  37.4 kb    0.6%
8. Levels        8.5 kb     0.1%
9. Scripts       228.4 kb   3.9%
10. Included DLLs 5.2 mb     91.7%
11. File headers  12.5 kb    0.2%
12. Complete size 5.7 mb     100.0%
13.  
14.  
15. Used Assets, sorted by uncompressed size:
16.  39.1 kb     0.7% Assets/BTX/GUI/Skin/Window.png
17.  21.0 kb     0.4% Assets/BTX/GUI/BehaviourTree/Resources/BehaviourTreeGuiSkin.guiskin
18.  20.3 kb     0.3% Assets/BTX/Fonts/DejaVuSans-SmallSize.ttf
19.  20.2 kb     0.3% Assets/BTX/Fonts/DejaVuSans-Bold.ttf
20.  20.1 kb     0.3% Assets/BTX/Fonts/DejaVuSansCondensed 1.ttf
21.  12.0 kb     0.2% Assets/BTX/Fonts/DejaVuSansCondensed.ttf
22.  10.8 kb     0.2% Assets/BTX/GUI/BehaviourTree/Nodes2/White.png
23.  8.1 kb  0.1% Assets/BTX/GUI/BehaviourTree/Nodes/RoundedBox.png
24.  8.1 kb  0.1% Assets/BTX/GUI/BehaviourTree/Nodes/Decorator.png
25.  4.9 kb  0.1% Assets/BTX/GUI/Skin/Box.png
26.  4.6 kb  0.1% Assets/BTX/GUI/BehaviourTree/GlovedHand.png
27. (and so on)
28.  

I kinda wish there was a front-end GUI that shows this though. Its probably easy to make one actually...

 

Aaaand so I just made one. Check it out here: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/178279-Build-Report-Window