The Asset Tracker is our only place to manage assets. Currently, it lacks a number of features to make managing assets easier and more convenient for users.
Some obvious shortcomings are (I've never used Vault so sorry if I miss something here):
- Asset status currently knows these states only: 'OK', 'Found','File Missing' for local paths, and 'Network Path' for assets located on network paths. While the information for local paths is good enough, there's no state for a missing asset on a network path. Whether or not an asset on the network is missing, the status will always be 'Network Path'. This needs to be improved, a 'Network Path - File Missing' status needs to be introduced.
- Sorting is currently only possible for assets names, there's no way currently to sort by asset paths. This makes redirecting paths very cumbersome for huge scenes. Please let us sort by paths and status, too.
- asset icons are greyed out for missing assets. In some cases, the difference between a normal 'healthy' icon state and the greyed out state is very difficult to see. Please introduce a new icon for missing assets, preferably the original icon with a red cross or anything else that is well visible for the user.
Additional feature requests:
- Please let us display assets for selected objects only. Currently we have no way to quickly display assets used on selected objects only.
- Please add a 'Search and Replace' feature for paths. This would make it easy to quickly redirect whole scenes without having to manually change each and every unique asset path in the scene.
- Please introduce a 'file type' column to the list. Sometimes, scenes need to be made production ready by making sure certain file types (such as Jpegs) aren't used because of quality issues. Sorting by file type would help us managing scenes in such a case.
- Please add a 'Collect' feature to quickly collect all scene assets in one place. I know that we have a 'Resource Collector' utility but it needs to be moved to the Asset Tracker IMO as it's the main place managing assets. This would also help to clean the UI and make it more accessible to new users.