'Reimport' not working

Hey all,

I’m dealing with an issue I’m 99% sure is a weird Unity bug or something since I searched the forum and didn’t see anything about it, but I wanted to see if anyone else had experienced this or had any ideas. Basically, right-clicking a file in the project window and selecting ‘Reimport’ doesn’t reimport the new version of the file, doesn’t seem to do anything really. I’ve tried it with textures, models, animations, etc. with no effect. This means that reimporting something requires deleting the file and selecting ‘Import New Asset’, which is usually just a minor inconvenience but sometimes can mean data loss, i.e. I just imported an updated animation this way, but it didn’t have the animation events I had put on it so I had to set those up again. I can foresee this costing me a lot of time in the future, so I was wondering if anyone might be able to give me any help.

Thanks!

Hi @achand004, here’s my quick fix:

Select prefab you want to reimport, right click it, select “show in Explorer”
Then replace your model directly in explorer, for instance: copy + paste + accept replace from document to asset folder.

When coming back to unity, model updates! See “import small assets” window.

Please choose an answer / reward :slight_smile:

I found the solution. On import, Unity copies the asset to the project directory. So when you reimport, it is reimporting the copy that’s in the project directory. It’s not re-importing the asset from the location of the first time you imported the asset. This is different than behaviour than Unreal Engine, so I didn’t find it intuitive at first. There are some advantages to this behaviour though. Namely, prefabs are not referencing external assets.

I have even quicker solution: just delete the object from Unity (ignore warning), it will disappear from scene window, but name links will remain saved. Then drop new object with same name to Unity project. It will appear perfectly where it should be. Nice and easy.