r/fabmarket

I’ve been working on Project Structure Guard, an Unreal Editor plugin for enforcing naming and folder conventions across a project.

The main reason I built it was pretty simple: naming and folder rules are easy to agree on at the start of a project, but much harder to keep consistent once the project grows and more content gets added.

For v1.2 I focused less on adding more rules and more on making the workflow around them safer and easier to use.

Some of the things I added:

• Baseline Tracking, so existing violations can be accepted and you can focus on newly introduced issues

• Protected Paths, so important folders can still be validated without allowing automatic structural changes

• Search and a more detailed result inspector for larger validation sets

• Bulk Preview 2.0 with Ready / Blocked / Skipped / Conflict states before rename or move operations

• Rule ordering, search/filtering and read-only rule testing

• Content Browser validation actions

• Quarantine + Restore for unused assets instead of immediately deleting them

• A -failonnew option for CI/CD, so existing accepted issues don’t have to fail the pipeline

I also tried to make destructive actions deliberately conservative. For example, normal unused assets can’t just be permanently deleted through the tool — permanent deletion is restricted to managed quarantined assets and still performs safety checks.

Here’s a short ~1 minute showcase of the current workflow:

https://youtu.be/wDlVkgT0nPU

Fab:

https://www.fab.com/listings/7dfc5ec6-1261-4f86-8e69-82ea0ae1e8a2

I’m developing this solo, so I’d be interested in feedback from people working on larger UE projects: what part of project structure tends to become the biggest pain for you — naming, folders, cleanup, or enforcing conventions across a team?

The short version: normal skeletal meshes in UE5 fall apart way before you hit thousands of characters — bone animation, per-object overhead, draw calls, all of it adds up fast. So instead I bake every animation into a texture (bone matrices, one block per frame) and read it straight in the vertex shader through a custom vertex factory. Each character on screen is just a lightweight instance — a transform, which animation, what time — instead of a full component.

To let individual characters look different (skin tone, outfit color, whatever) without spawning a material per character, I pack an RGB color into a single float and unpack it in the shader from per-instance data.

For behavior — movement runs in parallel across the whole crowd at once instead of one-by-one, obstacle avoidance uses the navmesh baked into a grid for fast lookups, and agents can be hit, knocked into a real ragdoll, or reactively pushed around.

Tested it on a several different PCs, from a beefy desktop down to a laptop with integrated graphics. On strong hardware the system itself barely costs anything — GPU is basically always the actual bottleneck, not the crowd logic.

Happy to answer questions or go deeper into any part of this if people are curious.