Break blueprint into its seperate components in a level?

Development Programming & Scripting Blueprint
1

Is it possible to break a blueprint that’s been put in a level into its separate components? Like exploding or ungrouping the blueprint.
Because I’ve converted a selection of static meshes into a blueprint, but I forgot to add a few, so now I’m looking into ungrouping it again because the blueprint conversion replaces the static meshes in the scene.

(btw I know of regular grouping of static meshes, that’s not what I want)

2

@Sleeper. I feel for you… if only… I’ve only found two ways of doing this:

  1. Once the BP is made, bring the new components in, one at a time ( yawn… ) ( or take them out )/

  2. Before you make the BP, keep a copy of the group of actors in the level. That way, when you later decide to build the BP differently, you still have the original actors and can easily make mods and remake the BP.

3

Hi – I also would like to know how to do this. Are you seriously telling us that there is no way to break apart a blueprint once you create it from components in your scene? I want to be able to move the items around in the scene, individually, not as a group. If we can’t undo a component blueprint, I would like to request that this capability be added to a future Unreal release.

4

@steamMelody It sounds a bit like you may be going about things the wrong way. What are you trying to achieve?

The whole point of putting objects into a BP is that they are related and you want to work with the in one place, with code.

If you want to break a BP apart, it probably means you didn’t want to put all the items together in the first place.

5

I think the main “want” here is basically a button that would replace the BP “on a level” with it’s component parts. That was you could easily drop in BP constructs then break them out so you could tweak things. Many marketplace things come with lots of pre-built BPs, but sometimes you don’t want everything to be BPs and you don’t want to modify all of the instances the same way.

You can easily take a bunch of static meshes and create a BP, but you can’t go the other way. What we want is to go the other way. Even if it was a scripted macro that would just automate the process.

1 Like
6

Kinda old’ish thread, but I ran into the same problem. I have a BP actor with bunch of static meshes inside. A lot of them are duplicates. What I’d like to do is to “merge” duplicate meshes into ISM component, while keeping transforms.

I tried doing so manually, but even when I copy transforms from mesh component into ISM instance, it’s always slightly off. So I have to manually adjust everything.

There is a plugin that allows selected meshes to be made into ISM’s instances, but it only works on the level and not inside BP Actor. The idea is to decompose, so to speak, BP actor into individual components on the levels. Extract components in other words. Then I would be able to create ISMs using that plugin and then make new BP actor with ISMs instead of a bunch of static meshes.

Have you folks figured out how to break down BP actor back to standalone components on the level ?

1 Like
7

Seems this has been going on for years in different threads and no answer.

2 Likes
8

This is my use case. I would like to decompose a BP and restructure the components as ISMs.

9

I’ll also throw my hat into the ring as having this need. If only we made the correct hierarchy decisions all the time we wouldn’t need this feature. But sometimes you can be many months into a project and realize that a component stuck inside a BP might be better “loose” on the level or inside a different BP.

You can Copy and Cut, buuuut you can’t Paste. Bummer.

Doesn’t seem to be a way other than copying down all the relevant paramters (by hand, on paper) and then re-creating the thing on the level and applying those params…

10

I came up with a nice solution by using Editor Utility functionality.

Here’s the Blueprint Function.

  1. Create an Editor Utility Widget (present in the list off all classes when creating a blueprint) and add a pressable button to it.
  2. Add a press event to the button.
  3. Create a function and copy its contents from the link. It extracts all static mesh components from the selected actors in the outliner and spawns individual static meshes, copying transforms and materials from the source actors.
  4. Connect the function to button press event.
  5. Right click on the created Editor Utility Widget and press ‘Run Editor Utility Widget’. This will spawn a window with the button that you’ve created.
  6. Select blueprints that you want to dissassemble and press the button.

You can expand the functionality to address any other components that you might want to extract from the blueprint.

Hope this helps!

1 Like
11

Hi,
I’ve run into an issue with copying and pasting the blueprint code into a function which causes it to have missing variables. Do you have a video tutorial on the 6 steps?