ArkodeFinding every texture a mesh pulls in
Tracing an Unreal asset through its materials to every texture it costs you, without clicking through the properties panel.
- Role
- Tech artist · Environment artist
A mesh costs you more than a mesh. It drags in its materials, those materials' parents, any material functions they call, and every texture at the end of that. Unreal's built-in Browse to Asset takes you to the mesh and stops there.
Working the rest out by hand means opening each material slot, opening each material, and reading the texture samplers. For one asset that's tedious; for a selection of thirty it isn't happening.
The one you'll use most
Select an actor in the viewport, or an asset in the Content Browser. Right-click, then Mosaic - Asset Zoos > Browse to Textures Used.
The Content Browser fills with every texture that selection reaches, however deep. Select thirty props and you get the full texture set for all of them.
Sort by size in the Content Browser and you have your answer about where the memory went.
The four jumps, and when each is the right one
| Jump | Gives you | Reach for it when |
|---|---|---|
| Materials Used | just the materials | you're reassigning or consolidating materials |
| Textures Used | every texture reached through those materials | you're chasing texture memory or resolution |
| Everything Used | the asset itself plus its whole material and texture chain | you want to move, copy or migrate the asset somewhere and take everything with it |
| Referencers | whatever points at the selection | you're about to delete something and need to know who'd notice |
Everything Used is the one to reach for before a migrate. It includes the asset itself, so the selection is complete and nothing arrives at the other end with missing materials.
Use Project Only when you're cleaning up
Each jump has a (Project Only) twin that leaves out engine content and plugin content, restricting results to /Game.
The plain version tells you the whole truth, including the engine materials your asset happens to use. That's what you want when you're investigating.
The Project Only version is what you want when you're about to act on the selection, because it can't sweep an engine asset into a delete or a migrate.
It works on a Mosaic picture too
The assets in an Asset Zoo picture are stamped with what they really are. Right-click a sphere in a materials view and the jump starts from the actual material, not from the sphere it's drawn on.
That makes an Asset Zoo picture browsable - spot something wrong from above, right-click it, and you're at the asset.