Variants

One asset, many variants

You rarely have just one version of a thing. A crate comes in oak, pine, and burnt. A sprite ships at four resolutions. A texture has its PBR maps, a half-size copy, and that one export you made for a jam two years ago. Dropped into the grid, twelve near-identical tiles bury everything around them.

Variants collapse those versions into a single tile. Your library shows one asset, not the dozen flavours of it, and the rest stay one click away. Nothing is moved, copied, or deleted on disk, it is purely how the library groups them.

Creating a group

Two ways, whichever suits the moment:

• Select and group. Select two or more assets, right-click, choose Group as Variants. The asset you right-clicked becomes the main, the one the grid shows.
• Drag one onto another. Drag an asset directly onto another to group them. Drop it onto a group's main to fold it into that existing group.

Grouped tiles get a small count badge. Click it to fan the variants out inline without leaving the grid, and expand as many groups at once as you like.

Ungrouping

Right-click a group's main and choose Ungroup Variants. Every variant goes back to standing on its own in the library. Select several mains first to ungroup multiple groups in one go.

To pull a single variant out while leaving the rest grouped, use Remove from Variant Group instead.

Choosing which one shows

The main is the asset the grid displays for the whole group. To change it, open the asset's details panel, find the Variants list, and hit the star on the variant you want front of house. The tile updates straight away.

Good to know

• Deleting a group removes all of its variants together, they travel as a unit. It is undoable like any other delete.
• Grouping never touches your files on disk. Variants are a library view, not a folder move.
• Drag a whole group out to an external application like Godot or Unity in one action. The entire set goes across together, no need to expand it first.
• Search works on individual assets, not the grouped tile, so every variant still turns up in results, including the ones folded inside a group.