Blueprints as Static Mesh Prefabs

Development Asset Creation
1

Hi All

We have a growing number of Marketplace and Non-Marketplace static meshes in our library and we are considering organising this for easy cataloging. (We have been lead to believe we shouldn’t be moving meshes and materials out of set locations as this can break things particularly when upgrading a Marketplace package)

One idea thrown around by the team is to create a blueprint for each static mesh so that we could mimic the Prefab functionality in Unity.

This library of Blueprints would a mixture of Blueprints with a singe static mesh and other “assembled” static mesh Blueprints.

My question is, in the final product build, is there any overhead at all with having Blueprint “prefabs” constructing our levels. These Blueprints would have absolutely no logic and just contain the Static Mesh or Meshes for each asset.

I have looked up multiple similar questions but there doesn’t seem to be a straight answer with most answers like “It should have minimal impact on performance” to “Shouldn’t matter too much”.

I’m just concerned about “Should or Shouldn’t” type answers, does anyone know for certain it there is any measurable impact at all on big levels.
My biggest concern is if I have a level with 1000’s of modular static meshes that are in Blueprints causing performance issues and being too late to change it.

Thanks in advance!

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For anyone also wondering like I was I have the answer.

If there is no code in the blueprint (i.e. the event nodes are all removed) and the blueprint is purely a “Static Mesh Blueprint” there is no performance penalty as Static Meshes when dragged to the scene are basically converted to Actor’s anyway and a Static Mesh Blueprint is just an actor in it’s own right.

I tested this myself after coming across this advice in another forum and testing with 5000 static meshes and then testing with 5000 Static Mesh Blueprints and no discernible drop in FPS (with lighting an shadows in the scene) at all and the profiler didn’t show any real difference either.

Hope this helps someone else wondering the same thing, good news for being able to create “prefabs” that can later be extended!

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Thank you, I was just looking into this and found your post.

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Thank you so much for this

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Thank you so much! @JW3153 I was wondering about this as well