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Is there a way to increase speed or disable "importing assets" feature?
I am working on a project that currently has 75 meshes with textures. The number of meshes and textures will continue to grow over the next few months.
Every time I add one new mesh and texture, the project starts "(re)importing assets" and takes forever (15-20 minutes sometimes). Even unchanged assets already loaded in the Hierarchy will reimport.
The files are not large (.ma files - Maya ASCII and each texture is less than a megabyte. No Maya Binary files are used so I do not believe the hangup is with FBX conversions). All paths are relative, so the import duration is not caused by pulling files from all over the place.
It is becoming somewhat of a momentum killer. . .
Any suggestions on how to speed this up?
Specs - Unity 2.6.1 Pro, MacBook Pro 2.5 GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 GB Ram, 512 Video
Added Followup:
Does anyone know if the file management structure in Unity 3 going to change? It would be great open large projects with many assets quicker.
Anyone know if you can flag certain assets so they don't get imported at all? I have a bunch of text files scattered amongst my assets which Unity doesn't need to know about.
This was meant as an answer to my comment up above. $$anonymous$$y non-asset text files were to be used as part of an editor process. For what I was trying to do, files with the extension .bytes would do the trick, but in general I don't think there's a way to selectively prevent assets from importing, certainly not by putting them in the Resources folder.
@yoyo if Unity doesn't need to know about, they shouldn't be inside /Assets
in the first place. Although I have lots of video files which Unity mostly don't need to know about unless I build a specific setting... So maybe you got a similar case. Any news here, $$anonymous$$r @bowditch?
@yoyo well, I just tried to convert it to a comment, just cuz I can (and in hope to improve it). Now I see why some comments get messed up on the dates... Yeah, even today I don't think there's a general good way to make the Editor preventing on importing assets.
Regarding disabling asset import, please consider up voting this Unity feedback https://feedback.unity3d.com/suggestions/per-folder-import-ignore-list
It would be nice to get this feature at some point.
Answer by morothar · Feb 18, 2010 at 08:46 AM
There is an option to stop Unity from automatically checking if files have changed and and reimporting them. Might be useful if you don't need to see any update of your work in Unity, like when you just add your assets without wanting to work with them right away. But this has the big drawback that you will have to manually refresh it. Not too good, but you get to decide yourself when the reimporting and all runs and schedule a meeting to fill in. ;)
It would be great if one could mark folders with "don't automatically refresh" flags or something.
Currently this setting is under `Preferences > General > Auto Refresh`. Also, as AquaGeneral already said in another answer, disabling `Compress Assets on Import` might help as well. But once you refresh the assets will still be imported and if it's big (such as videos) removing the tick from "compress assets" won't help. And I was hoping this might help with my git issue...
Thanks, the process is very annoying on the Linux editor, a popup appears with the import progress and it freezes the process, the OS keeps asking me "wait or kill" and the duration is big, 1$$anonymous$$ute for a very small project.
Answer by AquaGeneral · Feb 09, 2010 at 12:55 PM
Try disabling "Compress textures when importing" in the Unity Preferences (Edit/Preferences).
If that doesn't work maybe you could try contacting the Unity team directly, as 15-20 minutes is a first for me.
Sounds promising but what about compressing the textures, I mean when does it happen and how?
Answer by lukasbradley · Feb 09, 2010 at 03:58 PM
We also feel this is an issue that needs to be addressed.
Answer by andeeee · Feb 09, 2010 at 04:45 PM
You should certainly contact support@unity3d.com or else file a bug report for something like this.
Answer by yoyo · Jan 09, 2011 at 07:04 AM
This only works in very specific situations, but if you have assets that you load procedurally (for example, you load a file and use Texture2D.LoadImage to convert to a texture), then those assets probably don't need to be processed by the asset importer.
You can prevent them from importing normally by changing their file extension -- my project has 100's of ".jpg.x" files which are loaded procedurally as individual frames of texture animations. The phony extension means they get imported very quickly with the default (do-nothing) importer.