From what little I’ve seen of Unreal, nobody uses the grouping features of the outliner tree hierarchy, and it’s no wonder because it’s so poorly supported.
For a proper tree, one would expect:
Select all siblings/children/descendants/parent options
Collapse all/expand all
Collapse selection/expand selection
Show/hide selected branch and all children
Delete selected branch and all children
Freely rearrange branches/children
Remember arrangement/expanded branches between sessions
For such a mature product to have such a rudimentary outiner, it’s really surprising to me. Even Blender’s old and unloved outliner has better operations.
Coming from Unity, which has all of these features (and Max, and Keyshot and pretty much any other app with a tree), it’s one of the biggest hurdles to working in Unreal.
That’s not the same as “collapse all”, though, because if you shift-click the root node, and then expand it again, ALL child nodes are still expanded, and you have to go through each one individually.
If you’re working with Datasmith imports, you can have literally hundreds of these, and it’s simply unmanageable.
Besides, shortcuts are undiscoverable, so to a new user, it’s as if the feature might as well not exist.
I’m genuinely baffled at how useless the outliner is. Organising larger projects with it seems impossible, I just learned you can’t duplicate a hierarchy with the actors in it, keeping the hierarchy intact. That is the most basic function of any file browser ever made (except for unreal engine outliner, apparently).
I have no idea how people organise their projects with thousands of actors. It seems impossible to me. But the weirdest thing is, I barely see anyone talk about this? Is there something I’m missing?
Yes, it’s not even a priority for community moderators to merge threads, as this thread is a lot older than the one you linked, and community voices just get dilluted when people create new threads instead of posting in existing ones (especially now that there’s a vote feature)…
