First off … this was a mighty useful tidbit … so Thanks!
I had actually dealt with this earlier on as I do my work on multiple machines … so I had something like the below that I had in my .gitignore ( where I had full access to the content, ignored all and committed by exception ).
Most people import the starter content as it has some good stuff in it ( textures are pretty good IMO ). How do we make use of the starter content without having it inside the repo? I mean we could browse via the OS utilities like images viewers, but this is both clunky and it doesn’t account for complicated items like materials ( or any other .uasset ).
The idea of course is to actually have reasonable access to the content, yet not ever commit content that is not used ( even removed items from still drastically inflate the repo size ). If you committed 600mb for example and then deleted 590mb, your initial clone/pull on a repo would still include that deleted 590mb of data ( which is sort of the problem with using git for large projects ).
I’d be interested to see your thoughts.
# Custom Excludes for StarterContent
Content/StarterContent/HDRI/*
Content/StarterContent/Maps/*
Content/StarterContent/Architecture/*
Content/StarterContent/Audio/*
Content/StarterContent/Blueprints/*
Content/StarterContent/Particles/*
Content/StarterContent/Props/*
Content/StarterContent/Shapes/*
# We want to ignore the majority of the starter content, only excepting what we want
Content/StarterContent/Textures/*
Content/StarterContent/Materials/*
# Add in the exceptions that we are actually using
!Content/StarterContent/Textures/T_Ground_Grass_D.uasset
!Content/StarterContent/Textures/T_Ground_Gravel_D.uasset