Allow Cargo to work without the Unreal Plugin
closed
R
Rob McCowan
I upgraded my project to 5.3 this week and figured I'd update the cargo plugin later when I had more time.
All of the cargo imported assets were missing materials, and getting Cargo to understand my source built engine was a headache.
I appreciate what Cargo brings to the table in terms of keeping downloads organized and being able to only grab what you need, but I've switched back to downloaded Kits as I never want to risk having my project broken by an external dependency.
Is there hope for a Cargo export option that doesn't require any noodles to get injected into my project?
Thanks.
Maxx Burman
closed
Maxx Burman
under review
Maxx Burman
Hi Rob McCowan Sorry to hear about the issues you're running into.
Can you help me understand what happened? You mentioned your source built engine. Are you using a custom build of Unreal?
Currently Cargo does not support custom engine builds out of the box, but we can provide a source build of the plugin if you want to build against your engine. Let me know if that's the situation or if there's something I missed. Upgrading versions shouldn't break texture maps.
R
Rob McCowan
Maxx Burman: The textures remapped once I got the plugin working again, it just added an extra hurdle for me when I went to upgrade the engine version.
In general I'm fairly conservative about what I let make its way into my codebase, so I got a little paranoid when I saw already imported assets stop working after disabling the plugin.
I'm guessing the plugin has some well intentioned optimizations in it to help share materials between kits, but it'd feel a lot safer if those optimizations were baked into the assets directly so they kept working even without the plugin present.
I'm using the kits directly now so my own needs are met, and I'm just a solo game developer at this point, but this is a workflow I would have enforced back when I worked at larger studios as well.
Maxx Burman
Rob McCowan: Hey Rob, that makes a ton of sense.
Just to give some more information on what the plugin is doing. All assets are delivered as USD files so that they can be used across all DCCs and versions. This also allows us to store material information for any render engine. When you import an asset via the Cargo plugin, it's converting that asset to an Unreal Native format (UAssets) and moving those into your project folder. It's also looking to see what files are already in your project so we don't create duplicates.
There isn't anything here that would touch your actual project code, other than moving UAssets into the proper folders within the KitBash3D directory.
If you do want to use Cargo but have more control over what is in your project, you can use an intermediary software (like Blender) though you won't have blueprints or material properties exposed when converting them to UAssets yourself.
Just wanted to give some more information in case you do want to utilize the Cargo workflow, but the kitbash3d.com workflow isn't going anywhere, so if that works for you, awesome!