Welcome to the Animation Hub. Today, I will show you how to use one file per actor for linear content.
I have been asked multiple times, can you use the one file per actor approach for linear content projects?
The answer is yes. This workflow is totally fine for projects that do not utilize world partition.
We're going to start with a simple persistent level, which is referencing multiple sub-levels.
As you can see, all the actors are actually now under the specific level name.
And you're going to see how this changed later once we converted into one file per actor.
Currently, the persistent level only has, doesn't have any actors.
It's just referencing the sub-levels.
So it doesn't make sense to me to convert it into external,
into a one file per actor by using the external actors.
but it does matter the most is in this level which has most of the content so let's open this file
and for the sake of this demo i want to give it a unique name so let's say current levels as
and let's go to location and this is going to call level data room underscore one file per actor
Let's save that.
And now the next thing is that if you go to the world settings and then you type external actors you can just check this box on And automatically it going to ask you do you want to compare all actors to external packaging as well and i say yes
so what is going to do all the 96 93 actors that are in this level they are now saved as individual
files as you can see i'm going to open this up
you see every actor now is saved to a unique destination that way if I'm making changes to
plane 3 or any of these models any of these actors I can just do a check-in and check out
of that file so let's say it's selected and there you go now this is one file per actor
level. As you can see, if you remember before,
they used to be populated with the level name. Now, the level name is no longer
valid. It has an encoded file path, and
everything is still under the same level. When working with
a one file per actor level, it's highly
recommended. Actually, you must use the view changes
which allows you to see the exact name of the actor that you are about to commit a change.
Because if you look at how it looks in Perforce you can see here that the name of the file is encoded There is no way for you to tell what exactly this file is
That is why you must use this interface.
Once you're ready to submit, just go ahead, put your notes, and click submit.
We are now back in our simple persistent level,
which references regular levels.
I will now demonstrate that you can combine regular levels with one file per actor levels.
I will remove the level we just converted and replace it with the one file per actor version.
As you can see in the outliner, all these actors are under a parent group with the same name as the level.
In the level column, it now displays the encoded file name.
The rest of the actors that belong to regular levels will still display the name of the level they belong to.
This can be useful for collaborating with others on complex levels.
It allows one person to work on material overrides while another continues set dressing or adjusts
specific elements in the level without needing to wait for the level to be checked in.
Only the persistent level can be converted to a one file per actor when the Use External Actors option is enabled Sub must be converted separately or they can be converted automatically using a command let
as explained in the One File Per Actor documentation.
One thing that you might miss when using One File Per Actor
is that you can no longer group actors from different sub-levels
under the same folder in the Outliner.
If needed, you can convert a one file per actor level back to a traditional UMAP level
at any time.
This process removes the individual actor files stored in the external actors and external
objects folder and consolidates all actors data into the UMAP file itself.
In other words, all actors in the level become part of the single UMAP file again.
One of the main advantages of using one file per actor is the ability to track changes
at a granular level.
For example, when you click Save Content, you can use the Diff against Depot feature
to see exactly what has changed since the last saved version of each actor file.
This makes it easier to review, debug, and collaborate on specific changes within a level.
That's all for now.
I hope this tutorial helped clarify how to work with one file per actor effectively.
Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next Animation Help tutorial.