Introduction

AYON supports the latest Unreal Engine versions 5.x.

AYON in Unreal Engine allows you to create, publish and manage assets and scenes across different projects and platforms. AYON handles tasks such as loading, validation, synchronization, rendering and publishing in Unreal.

Prerequisites

You need to install the AYON Integration plugin from the Unreal Marketplace.

AYON unreal addon will try to build the plugin if it couldn't find one.

Admins can refer to Setting the AYON UE Plugin Path for further information about AYON Unreal plugin deployment.

If you encounter a warning about missing PySide6 when you run Unreal, your installation is missing Qt bindings. Here are the steps to fix it: Manually installing Qt bindings.

AYON Unreal Workflow Notes

Single Unreal Project per AYON project

While other hosts in AYON have specific workfiles for each task, Unreal Engine is a bit different.

An Unreal project is made by design to contain all the content of a project, so it wouldn't make sense to have more than one.

We recommend creating a single task in AYON specifically for Unreal, and use that task to manage the Unreal project. This way user selects the dedicated task for Unreal Project in AYON Launcher and launch it by UE icon at the bottom.

For linear animation projects, and in particular for episodic formats, we still recommend keeping only one Unreal project. Having a project for each episode would result in duplicated data between the episodes, and it would be hard to manage.

Unreal Project and Shots in AYON

AYON supports publishing render to different AYON folder paths.
Therefore, users in the task dedicated to UE are can publish renders to other AYON folder paths.

For instance, Creator / Publisher tool Publish tab allows users to pick a target folder path and task within the current AYON project forthe selected product(s).

Not only renders but also assets, generally speaking any AYON product, e.g. they can publish layouts to other folder paths like layout product in environment/main_hall folder.

Understadning AYON Unreal Project Structure

The structure of the project data is handled by AYON. The first time you create an instance or load an asset, AYON will create a folder called AYON in the Content Browser. This folder will contain all the data handled by AYON, and it is organised as follows:

/Content/AYON/ is the default AYON root directory. Its contents reflect AYON project hierarchy.
By default, Any Loaded products from AYON Loader will be added in a folder named based on the product name and version {your_product_name}_{product_version} to their respecitve folder path inside contents folder.
This is can be configured by your admin. Please refer to your admin to know about your studio project structre.

AYON data folders are color coded by unique color scheme for easier navigation.

The new color only appears after restarting the UE Editor.

AYON Uassets Types

AYON introduces two type of Unreal Assets acting as sort of containers.
They are created by AYON when you load something with the Loader or create something with the Creator / Publisher.

AyonAssetContainer : Denoted by _CON suffix in the name. This type is used to store metadata of loaded assets.
AyonPublishInstance : Denoted by _INS suffix in the name. This type is used to store metadata of assets that are going to be published.

These assets are used only to manage Ayon metadata in Unreal, and they are not meant to be used directly in the scene.

Unreal Project Versioning

In other DCCs, we rely on up-versioning workfiles in the task folder. However, in Unreal, we only have one project workfile per task. Currently, Perforce is used for versioning the Unreal project outside of AYON, manually by the artists—there is no other way to do it right now.

AYON has a dedicated addon for Perforce support. Please refer to Working with Perforce in AYON to learn more.