yeah, i was just thinking on the fly, morph targets are actually a terrible solution for an escalator. i need to learn more about reading performance stats and optimizing in ue4. i also need to stop prematurely optimizing things before i even start making them.
i like your spline tool, it seems like a decent tool for quickly prototyping some very organic environments. i made a similar thing a while back, for making linear arrays of instance static meshes. it could just make straight lines or circular curves, but not splines. but i gave up on it when i couldn’t figure out how to combine all the instances into a single mesh automatically.
now, if i need 25 arches in a row, i just model a set of static meshes of different lengths, where one would be 8 arches, another would be 3 arches, 2 arches, and 1 arch. then in the editor, i can combine these to create any length, but also be efficient on draw calls.