GitHub - Allar/ue5-style-guide: An attempt to make Unreal Engine 4 projects more consistent

Rules

1. Identifiers

In any Identifier of any kind, never use the following unless absolutely forced to:

• White space of any kind
• Backward slashes \\
• Symbols i.e. #!@$%
• Any Unicode character

1. Always Use PascalCase*

PascalCase refers to starting a name with a capital letter and then instead of using spaces, every following word also starts with a capital letter. For example, DesertEagle, RocketPistol, and ASeriesOfWords.

1. Never Use Spaces
2. Never Use Unicode Characters And Other Symbols

If one of your game characters is named 'Zoë', its folder name should be Zoe.

1. Use A Top Level Folder For Project Specific Assets

All of a project's assets should exist in a folder named after the project. For example, if your project is named 'Generic Shooter', all of it's content should exist in Content/GenericShooter.

1. Do Not Create Folders Called Assets or AssetTypes
2. Creating a folder named Assets is redundant

All assets are assets.

1. Creating a folder named Meshes, Textures, or Materials is redundant

Want to view only static mesh in Environment/Rocks/? Simply turn on the Static Mesh filter. If all assets are named correctly, they will also be sorted in alphabetical order regardless of prefixes. Want to view both static meshes and skeletal meshes? Simply turn on both filters. This eliminates the need to potentially have to Control-Click select two folders in the Content Browser's tree view.

Not doing this also prevents the inevitability of someone putting a static mesh or a texture in a Materials folder.

1. Very Large Asset Sets Get Their Own Folder Layout

This can be seen as a pseudo-exception to 2.6.

There are certain asset types that have a huge volume of related files where each asset has a unique purpose. The two most common are Animation and Audio assets. If you find yourself having 15+ of these assets that belong together, they should be together.

For example, animations that are shared across multiple characters should lay in Characters/Common/Animations and may have sub-folders such as Locomotion or Cinematic.

This does not apply to assets like textures and materials. It is common for a Rocks folder to have a large amount of textures if there are a large amount of rocks, however these textures are generally only related to a few specific rocks and should be named appropriately. Even if these textures are part of a Material Library.

1. MaterialLibrary

If your project makes use of master materials, layered materials, or any form of reusable materials or textures that do not belong to any subset of assets, these assets should be located in Content/Project/MaterialLibrary.

This way all 'global' materials have a place to live and are easily located.

This also makes it incredibly easy to enforce a 'use material instances only' policy within a project. If all artists and assets should be using material instances, then the only regular material assets that should exist are within this folder. You can easily verify this by searching for base materials in any folder that isn't the MaterialLibrary.

The MaterialLibrary doesn't have to consist of purely materials. Shared utility textures, material functions, and other things of this nature should be stored here as well within folders that designate their intended purpose. For example, generic noise textures should be located in MaterialLibrary/Utility.

Any testing or debug materials should be within MaterialLibrary/Debug. This allows debug materials to be easily stripped from a project before shipping and makes it incredibly apparent if production assets are using them if reference errors are shown.

1. No Empty Folders

accidental delete:

shedlight blueprint

Asset Naming Conventions

Naming conventions should be treated as law. A project that conforms to a naming convention is able to have its assets managed, searched, parsed, and maintained with incredible ease.

Most things are prefixed with prefixes being generally an acronym of the asset type followed by an underscore.

1.1 Base Asset Name - Prefix_BaseAssetName_Variant_Suffix

All assets should have a Base Asset Name. A Base Asset Name represents a logical grouping of related assets. Any asset that is part of this logical group should follow the standard of Prefix_BaseAssetName_Variant_Suffix.

For unique but generic variations of assets, Variant is a two digit number starting at 01. For example, if you have an environment artist generating nondescript rocks, they would be named Rock_01, Rock_02, Rock_03, etc. Except for rare exceptions, you should never require a three digit variant number. If you have more than 100 assets, you should consider organizing them with different base names or using multiple variant names.

Depending on how your asset variants are made, you can chain together variant names. For example, if you are creating flooring assets for an Arch Viz project you should use the base name Flooring with chained variants such as Flooring_Marble_01, Flooring_Maple_01, Flooring_Tile_Squares_01.

1.1 Examples

1.1e1 Bob

1.1e2 Rocks

1.2 Asset Name Modifiers

When naming an asset, use these tables to determine the prefix and suffix to use with an asset's Base Asset Name.

1.2.1 Most Common

1.2.2 Animations

1.2.4 Blueprints

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1.2.5 Materials

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1.2.6 Textures

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1.2.7 Miscellaneous

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1.2.10 Sounds

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