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Assets Workflow

There are more ways in which Curved Poly Editor stores data into your project. The Assets workflow has been completely reworked, and significantly improved, in version 1.3, so, this section of our documentation is to be considered new also for people who have already experienced any previous version of Curved Poly. Let's start with the basics. Whereever you want to start modeling something, you could start with a premade shape. There are two main ways to do so: from Game Objects Tools, you can press Import and grab an Asset. In this case the asset is imported as a copy of the original model. A game object is generated in scene, with a Curved Poly Component. The Curved Poly Component has assigned an Asset whose name is none. This means that the model you cloned is stored within the Curved Poly component, which is part of the Scene, and it doesn't refer to any specific asset.

On the other side, you can use Load in place of Import. Load does pretty much the same thing, with the huge difference that once a model is loaded, it's Curved Poly Component is directly referencing the original asset itself. This means that the model will not be saved in the scene. And that any change on the model will affect also the original asset, and every other object using it.

So we have models stored in scene, and models stored in assets. It is possible to create new Assets from both of them. Creating new assets is good since you can reuse them on more objects. Let's say we have made some changes to our model and we want to store the changes in a new asset. When we press Save, a new asset is generated with a preassigned progressive name, but you can move it where you want, and rename it as you wish.

When you select the asset in the project, the Inspector shows a preview of the model itself. Here we have a third way to add models to the scene, by clicking on Add to Scene. Add to Scene generates a new model with the same name of the Asset added, and the new object is referencing.

Once the object using the asset is in scene, you may need to break the link with the original asset. There are two ways to do so. We can press on Save Asset As New to generate a new asset different from the first one. The new asset is now independet from the first one, and can be reshaped apart.

Another possibility is to detach the asset from the object, with Detach From Asset. In this way the asset is cloned on the Curved Poly Component, and the reference on the Curved Poly Component becomes none, making the models to be stored in scene, rather as part of a Curved Poly Asset.

There's another important thing about Curved Poly Assets. They can be collected into libraries, making it easier to share them among more projects. In order to do so, we go on Project and press on Create, Curved Poly, Curved Poly Assets Library. This generates an empty library.

Now you can select one or more Assets, and there is a button in the inspector saying Copy into library. We click on Copy into library, and we can choose which is the library we want to send our objects to. The assets are copied into the library, so in this case we still need to decide if we need to keep the original assets, or if we wish to dispose of them and keep only the copy we made in the library.

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