Asset Browser

During the development of Alien: Isolation the art director requested a tool to manage the game's 3d art content from within 3ds Max.
At the time there wasn't a 3rd party option which fulfilled the brief so I set about focusing my time on designing and creating one.
The resulting tool would allow the artist to create, organise and manage their 3d art assets and materials.
On disk, each asset's content was contained within its own folder.
Asset's could be submitted, sync'd and checked out in Perforce.
Artists would first create new assets within the Asset Browser. This would then generate all the minimum required files from which they would then further edit and add to.
As an example, a newly created 3d asset would, amongst its files, contain a 3ds Max file which itself would contain data for a simple cube mesh. The artist would then, via the Asset Browser, open this Max file for editing before resaving and re-exporting the data via the Asset Browser.
One of the most complex features to create was its ability to allow assets to be referenced within other assets. So, as an example, a room asset could consist of referenced wall panel assets.
The nested asset referencing data matched the file format our in-house editor used so it was possible for both 3ds Max and the editor to read and edit the same data.
When an asset was saved back to the library the Asset Browser would also auto-generate a thumbnail too. If it were a 3d mesh asset then a render of the 3d model was created. However, if it were a material asset then a sphere was rendered with the material displayed on it.
The Asset Browser became an integral part of the artists and designers content workflows and was used throughout the project's development. For Halo Wars 2 the same approach was used but I did a complete rewrite of the tool to make it faster, cleaner and with a few extra features which included a 'heatmap' view for 3d assets which showed small triangles as red all the way up to large triangles as blue, which served as a great high level visual means of checking the complexity of meshes.