Assets and importing

Everything a project uses, from scenes to sounds, is an asset, listed in the Assets panel.

The Assets panel

On the left is the tree of groups (folders), with Content, the whole project, at the top. On the right are the selected group’s contents: its groups first, then its assets. Double-click a group to go into it, and use the path at the top of the panel to go back up.

The toolbar beside the path holds:

• the search box, which looks in the shown group and every group under it, by name or by the start of an asset’s ID. From Content it searches the whole project, and each match says which group it is in;
• the filter button, which shows only one type of asset;
• the Tiles and List buttons, which show the assets as thumbnails or as rows.

In List view, each asset shows its type and whether it is cooked: Cooked, Stale (not cooked yet, or being cooked) or Failed (the Console says why). A star marks a favourite, and a mark shows what is set to Always Export. Tiles view shows only each asset’s thumbnail and name.

• Double-click an asset, or press Enter, to open it.
• Ctrl+click and Shift+click select several.
• F2 renames, and Delete deletes after asking.
• Right-click an asset for Open, Rename, Duplicate, Copy GUID, Copy Path, Pin as Favourite, Always Export, Cook, Rebuild and Delete…. Cook, Rebuild and Delete act on every selected asset.
• Right-click the background for New, New Group, Import…, and the shown group’s own commands: Rename, Always Export Its Contents, Cook Group, Rebuild Group and Delete Group….

Creating assets

The background menu’s New makes new assets: scenes, prefabs, input maps, render textures, navigation zones and particle effects, then by category:

Category	Assets
Animation	Animation Graph, Property Animation Clip
Audio	Audio Bus Layout, Sound Cue
GUI	GUI Document, GUI Style Sheet
Materials	PBR Material, Unlit Material, Phong Material, Lit Surface Shader, Unlit Surface Shader, Low-Level Shader
Physics	Physical Material, Collision Shape
Primitives	Cube, Sphere, Plane, Cylinder, Cone, Torus
Rendering	Environment Profile, Post Process Profile
Scripts	A Behavior, Level or Game script, in Luau or AngelScript
Terrain	Heightfield, Terrain, Splatmap, Vegetation Mask

A new asset is created in the shown group and opens in its page. The File menu has the same list; an asset made from there goes into its type’s usual group instead.

Always Export

An export packs every cooked asset, unless its preset is set to keep only what the game reaches from its default scene and startup script. An asset the game loads only by name from a script is not reached that way. Mark it Always Export (or mark a group Always Export Its Contents) and the export keeps it, with everything it uses. The marks are saved in the project’s export_roots.xml.

Importing your own files

Bring files in with Import… on the Assets panel’s right-click menu, or drag them onto the editor from your file manager. They land in the group the Assets panel shows.

Kind	File types
Models	.glb, .gltf, .fbx, .obj
Textures	.png, .jpg, .jpeg, .tga, .bmp, .hdr, .dds
Images	.png, .jpg, .jpeg, .tga, .bmp, .hdr
Sounds	.wav, .ogg, .mp3, .flac
Fonts	.ttf, .otf, .ttc
Scripts	.luau, .as
Shaders	.hlsl
GUI	.xml (documents), .css (style sheets), .svg (vector images)
Terrain	.png and .r16 heightfields, .png splatmaps and vegetation masks

A file of a type no importer takes is reported and left out. EXR is not supported; use HDR.

The import dialog

The Import dialog shows where the files go (click the Into field to pick another group), what each file will make, and its options. With several files, it lists them on the left, each with a checkbox to keep or drop it; select one to see its options. A file that more than one importer can take (a .png can be a texture, an image, a heightfield, a splatmap or a vegetation mask) has a choice of importer. A single file with nothing to choose imports straight away, without the dialog.

If an asset in the group already has the name an import would use, the dialog says so on the file. An asset of another type has to be renamed first; an asset of the same type, imported from another file, can be replaced or kept beside the new one.

A model lists the meshes, materials, textures, skeleton, animation clips and collision it will make; clear any you do not want, or rename them. Its options:

Option	Default	What it does
Textures	On	Import the model’s images as textures
Materials	On	Import its materials, with the textures wired in
Animations	On	Import its skeleton and animation clips
Generate prefab	On	Make a prefab of the model, to place in scenes
Generate scene	Off	Make a scene of the model
Generate collision	Off	Make a collision shape per mesh, and add colliders and a static body to the prefab
Generate LODs	On	Make lower detail levels for large static meshes (10,000 triangles and up); meshes with their own _LOD1 and _LOD2 levels keep those
Root motion	Off	New clips move the character by their root’s travel and turn, and play in place
Convex collision	Off	Make that collision from simplified convex hulls (which can move) instead of exact triangle meshes

A sound’s options are Stream (on by itself for sounds longer than 10 seconds or larger than 2 MB), Force mono, Loop, Trim trailing silence and Normalize. Other file types have no options.

Where imported files go

The editor copies each file into the project’s Sources/ folder; a glTF’s textures are copied beside it. To update an asset, import the same file again into the same group: the dialog starts from your earlier choices, and a model’s generated prefab or scene is made again.

Cooking

The game does not load assets as you edit them: it loads their cooked form, in the project’s Cooked/ folder. The editor cooks for you:

• after an import, the group the files landed in;
• when you create an asset, and when you save most kinds of asset in their page;
• when you open a page whose asset, or something it uses, is not cooked yet;
• when you press Play, before the game starts;
• when a file in Sources/ changes on disk (the editor checks every two seconds), so a model you export again from your modelling tool updates by itself.

Build > Cook All cooks everything that changed, and Build > Rebuild All cooks everything again. Build > Cook This Asset saves the active page and cooks its asset and what it uses. The Assets panel’s right-click menu does the same for the selected assets or for one group. Cooking runs in the background; its progress is in the status bar and its messages in the Console.