Hello everyone, this is my first post on UE forums. I would like to provide feedback on what i think would provide tremendous improvements in Blueprint component editor.
VERTEX SNAP (blueprint > components) - currently there is no possibility to align static meshes perfectly in blueprint editor. I know that you can align bunch of actors on the scene and convert them to blueprint. But if you would like to change anything or position some Instanced Static Meshes, there is no way to achieve perfect alignment in blueprint editor ATM.
UNLOAD SELECTED STATIC MESHES TO ACTIVE LEVEL (blueprint > components) - this is somehow related to previous suggestion, I can convert selected actors to blueprint, but there is no possibility to convert blueprint static meshes back to level actors. This would partially mitigate lack of blueprint vertex snapping, but I think that it could be useful in many other use cases.
INSTANCING STATIC MESH LIGHTMAP (blueprint > components) - I might be wrong, but it seems that currently lightmaps are broken for blueprint instanced static meshes, what actually prevents from use of this feature with static-static meshes.
Blueprint editor vertex snap and fixed blueprint instances static meshes lightmaps, would allow to greatly reduce draw calls greatly for complex blueprint objects consisting of multiple repeating static meshes - beacause of that having at least those those two features working would be a life saving awesome thing!
Thanks for the feedback! We are slowly getting more features from level editing into the BP editor. Next release should have orthographic views for example!
We have talked about this in the past, I don’t think it would be too hard, but you would lose any scripting you had set up, so we were not sure how useful it would be.
Precomputed lightmaps should certainly work on ‘static’ StaticMeshComponents added to a BP. Please post repro on AnswerHub if you are running into a problem with that. Or are you talking about an InstancedStaticMeshComponent? Static lighting is not supported on those yet, but we are working on it!
I will try to outline my use case briefly, which is the reason why I requested those specific features.
I have a specific workflow, where I assemble multiple unique buildings form multiple static meshes, which are (mainly) unique to given building. I use blueprint as a handy prefab-style container, where you just assemble numerous static meshes together.
I assemble each building on separate level (as the editing capabilities of blueprint component editor are not par with level editor), then I convert assembled building to a blueprint, and after that I need to re-open level without saving changes to the level (because otherwise loose actors will be replaced with blueprint). If I want to make more complex changes to the building, like replacing multiple vertex-aligned meshes, I need to add/replace those meshes in level editor, convert everything to new blueprint with different name, then override old blueprint (replace references), which is already placed in a production level. At the end I rename new blueprint to the name of old, replaced blueprint.
This can be quite tedious:)
Anyway, I’m glad that UE4 is getting more awesome with each release!
I know this is old but how do you manage to keep the pre-computed lightmaps when transferring to blueprint? (by precomputed lightmaps here I understand lightmaps built in the map you create your building before transforming it to a blueprint).
I’m kinda using the same system to overcome the poor editing performance of blueprints and I can’t get the lightmaps to show on the objects when I instance the blueprint in the master map. It turns out the lighting reverts to dynamic when the blueprint is instantiated (is this a limitation or the lightmaps are not carried over to objects in blueprint?)
Any thoughts?