Plugin for Cleaning Up Projects in Unreal Engine 5.4

Demo

• Link Complete Demo: https://youtu.be/4wPZSKOpgCM

Problem

When working on a project, artists often accumulate a lot of unused assets, including static meshes, blueprints, levels, and more. This can make the project bulky and difficult to manage. The packaging process can become time-consuming and may fail due to the excess of unused assets. To resolve this, there are two main options: manually deleting the unused assets, which can take hours depending on the project or migrating the level to a new project, which can be dangerous because there are usually issues with missing assets.

Solution

Create a plugin in Unreal Engine 5.4 to efficiently remove all unused assets from the project. This will help speed up the packaging process and reduce the final build size.

Characteristics

• Lower the size of your project or packaged game by deleting unused assets
• Allow the user to go straight to packaging the game by simply clicking the packaging button.
• Keep your project organized and clean

Plugin Usage

To test the plugin, you should create an Unreal Engine project with C++ code and enable the plugins folder.

Step 1. Paste the plugin into the Plugins folder in your project

Step 2. Open you Unreal project

Step 3. Check if the plugin is enable

Step 4. Open the plugin and Clean

You can open the plugin using:

1. The short keyboard : Ctrl + Shift + C
2. Or going to Tools and selected the Clean Master tool

Executing Unit Tests in the Editor

Plugin UI Design

TestWorld Game

I will develop a small world game to test the tool. It will be a third-person game where players can interact and collect points in the world. I will use assets from Fab and develope some mechanics to make the whole project test more attractive.Below is a demo example of the world I created in UE5. it's a prototype, but the stetic would be similar.

Plugin UI

Plugin Content Drawer

IDE

I will use Rider, which is a better IDE than Visual Studio to work with Unreal Engine projects.

Project Management Tool

For project tracking and task management, I used Jira to organize the development workflow and monitor progress.You can find the link to the session below.

Resources

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ijpa9mI2b5I&t=23s
• https://github.com/Allar/ue5-style-guide
• https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/courses/r1M/unreal-engine-technical-guide-to-linear-content-creation-pre-production/mX6b/unreal-engine-project-structure-naming-conventions
• https://github.com/zompi2/UE4EditorPluginTemplate
• https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/working-with-assets-in-unreal-engine
• https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/asset-management-in-unreal-engine
• https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/API/Runtime/Engine/Engine/UAssetManager
• https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/API/Runtime/AssetRegistry/AssetRegistry/FAssetRegistryModule
• https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/filesystem/path
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3_R0Xg0kI4