Create and Process Scene Source Assets

Assets can be created in any content creation program that can export to a file format supported by Open 3D Engine’s (O3DE) Asset Pipeline. This section focus on scene source assets, which are 3D meshes and animations created in applications such as Blender or Maya.

Source and product assets

Scene source assets (meshes, actors, motions, and PhysX colliders) that are created in digital content creation (DCC) applications must be processed as runtime optimized product assets to be used in your project. To provide the broadest support for DCC applications and scene file formats, O3DE integrates the Open Asset Import Library . O3DE uses .fbx as its primary format for scene source assets. O3DE also supports .stl, and support for .gltf is enabled and currently in development.

Scene settings

When source assets are placed in a scan directory, Asset Processor detects the new or modified files, determines the contents of the files, and then processes the data using scene settings that tell Asset Processor how to process the files.

Scene settings can come from several places:

• Default scene settings logic exists for all supported asset types. Asset Pipeline uses this default logic to process scene files when no other settings exist.
• Soft naming conventions on the mesh and skeleton nodes in the source asset can be used to override the default logic. For example, a node with the suffix _phys is treated as a collision mesh.
• User generated .assetinfo files override the default logic, and can override soft naming conventions. These sidecar files have the same name as their relative source asset file, but have a .assetinfo extension. For example, myCharacter.fbx.assetinfo contains the scene settings for myCharacter.fbx. User generated .assetinfo files are created with the Scene Settings tool.
• Some jobs output procedurally generated .assetinfo files as part of asset processing. These files take priority over user generated .assetinfo files because the procedural system can read the source file when generating scene settings and choose to override them.
• Python scripts can be called to modify the scene settings loaded in memory when an asset is processed. This can override all other scene settings, because the script can read the scene settings provided through any other method and modify them.

Scene source assets topics

The topics in this section provide general information about creating scene source assets and the Scene Settings tool that you can use to customize how scene source assets are processed.