Previews and library processing
Catalog entries get interactive previews and full metadata from the project that holds their source assets. Library processing is how your editor contributes them: it finds entries waiting for processing whose assets are in the open project, exports a preview for each, and uploads it. Entries whose assets live in another project are left for that project’s editor.
Process Library
Section titled “Process Library”The quickest way to catch up is the Process Library button in the Prophouse panel header. Its dot shows how much is waiting:
| Dot | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Green | Library fully processed |
| Yellow | Some entries are waiting |
| Red | More than 100 are waiting |
Hover the button to see the count, for example 42 assets awaiting processing. The count stops at 500 and shows 500+ beyond that.
Clicking Process Library starts a run over every type and opens the Prophouse Processing tab so you can watch it. The run keeps going if you close either panel.
The Prophouse Processing tab
Section titled “The Prophouse Processing tab”Open it from Window → Prophouse Processing, or by clicking Process Library. Under Library processing it has:
- A table with one row per type (Meshes, Skeletal meshes, Textures, Audio). Each row has a checkbox and three counts: Pending (entries a run would pick up now, across all projects), Ready, and Unavailable (entries whose preview cannot be generated).
- Refresh counts to re-fetch the table.
- Process selected types to run only the ticked types. The button reads Processing… during a run, and Cancel stops it.
- Recapture thumbnails (see below).
- An Activity log with one row per asset and an Errors only filter.
Each log row has a status: processed, skipped, failed, unavailable, quarantined, deferred or crashed. After a run, a summary reads N processed · N failed · N unavailable · N not local, where “not local” counts entries whose assets are in another project.
The background worker
Section titled “The background worker”Runs execute in a separate, headless Unreal process so the editor stays responsive. Exporting a mesh preview bakes its materials on the GPU, and some assets can crash Unreal’s material baker. When that happens only the worker dies: the plugin quarantines the asset that crashed, relaunches the worker and continues, showing Processing hit a bad asset (<name>) — quarantined it, continuing (N skipped so far)….
A run stops early if the worker crashes twice on the same asset, crashes before processing anything, or crashes on 10 different assets. Click Process Library again to continue with the rest. The worker writes its log to Saved/Logs/PhPreviewWorker.log in your project.
Geometry-only previews
Section titled “Geometry-only previews”Mesh previews are textured by default: each material is baked into small textures, which needs a working GPU. On machines with a weak GPU or unstable graphics drivers, turn off Bake preview textures (GPU) in Editor Preferences → Plugins → Prophouse → Previews. Previews then export geometry only. They render untextured in the catalog, but the export is faster and never touches the material baker.
After a GPU-related editor crash, the recovery notification can offer Use geometry-only previews, which turns the setting off for you. See Crash recovery.
Background previews
Section titled “Background previews”To process the library slowly while you work, turn on Auto-generate 3D previews (background) under Previews. Every Background preview interval (default 45 seconds, minimum 15) the editor exports and uploads one waiting entry whose asset is local.
In the current version, background processing handles texture and audio previews only. Mesh previews always run through the separate worker, via Process Library or Process selected types, so a crashing bake can never take down your editor. Background processing pauses while a manual run is in progress, and it only runs while Enable background polling is on.
Recapture thumbnails
Section titled “Recapture thumbnails”Recapture thumbnails in the Prophouse Processing tab re-captures the browse thumbnail of every entry this project owns and uploads it again. Use it to replace thumbnails that came out grey or dark in earlier pushes. It prefers the package’s cached thumbnail and renders a fresh one when that is missing or too dark. Thumbnails uploaded by hand in the web library are never replaced.
Replaced thumbnails are re-indexed on the server, so natural-language search results for those entries improve too.