Designer does not import SymLinked Assets

[Cpt.Sloth1992]

Hi,
I´ve recently setup a new library of sbsar files, using Symbolic Links to be able to have all graphs in one location on an external harddrive instead of having multiple copies of the same graph for the Painter Shelf and for Designers Library.

This works great with SP but I now noticed that SD does not seem to recognize any files that are placed in its Library folder via SymLinks. If I change the library-folder url to the real location of the file, it is found by SD and everything works again.

Doing this for every file I want to add to my SD Library would be an insane amount of work and since some files are in the same folder as files that I don´t want to add to SD, this would also require splitting up those folders and breaking many of the symlinks that already work with painter.

Is this expected and/or intended design or a bug that might be fixed in one of the next updates?

[Luca Giarrizzo]

Hello,

Thank you for reaching out to us.

Substance Designer currently has several limitations when using SymLinks. Here is a list of known issues:

• Adding SmyLinks in the User Projects' watched Library folders will add the target path instead of the SymLink's;
• This can be circumvented by manually replacing the SymLink path in the user *.SBSPRJ project file;
• SymLinks cannot be accessed recursively - i.e. SymLink subfolders are not accessed and their content is not added to the Library.

As mentioned in the second list item, for now you can use SymLinks by adding their paths directly in the *SBSPRJ project file, but if you add a folder containing SymLink subfolders, these will not be accessed.

We understand this can significantly impact specific workflows, and we will investigate the issue further.
When a fix is implemented in a future release of Substance Designer, we will notify you in this thread.

We thank you for your patience!

Best regards,
Luca Giarrizzo

[Cpt.Sloth1992]

Hi,
Thank you for your detailed answer! I took the opportunity to start learning some python and wrote a small script that mostly automates the process of adding full paths to individual SymLinked assets to the SD Watchlist.

If anyone else finds this thread while having a similar issue, I uploaded the script to Substance Share here: https://share.substance3d.com/libraries/5653