New to Unreal, and trying to figure things out. In Unity, I have imported FBX models originally from CAD. In the scene Hierarchy I see all of the levels of the original CAD assembly and sub-assemblies (see attached Unity screen shot). On my first day using Unreal I imported the same model. Clicking around, at one point I was able to see this same hierarchy in Unreal. Now days later, clicking and right-clicking absolutely everywhere, I can’t find this again! Can anyone tell me how to display this sort of hierarchy in Unreal?
Hey there @JohnAtHSS! Welcome to the community! The scene outliner displays a similar hierarchy:
If it’s missing from your layout you can bring another one in by going up to window and reenabling it:
Let me know if you have any questions!
Thank you. Yes I have seen the Outliner. But I am referring to the hierarchy of the part or Actor itself. The screen I saw displayed only the Actor, with its hierarchy very similar to what is shown in the Unity screen. It was displayed on the left side of the screen and included the “null_…” labels. I was able to cntrl-Tab from that screen to the main editor screen. (It did not pop up in its own window.)
Ahhh depending on if it was imported as a Skeletal Mesh it could be the SKM tree, you can access it by finding the Skeletal Mesh file for the mesh you imported and opening it up. However this primarily shows off bones, if you have just groups it may “create” bones, but matches your description!
If not, you may have been working in a blueprint (Like a prefab in Unity) but unless each piece was a separate SM you wouldn’t have a hierarchy, so it’s likely the first answer but I thought I’d give possible visuals to try and jog your memory if I was wrong!
I tried importing one of the models as a skeletal mesh, but it seems to have been imported as a sort of dummy mesh. Double-clicking on it does not open the edit window. Nothing happens.
The Blueprint screen seems to have possibilities. How would I open the Actor that way?
So if you’re trying to make a BP of your mesh there’s a number of ways to start going about it.
You’re going to want to derive from the actor class, so just click actor up here and rename it to whatever you want then open it by double clicking:
You’ll then be greeted by this screen:
That object in the center is the root object, you can replace that in the top level with your root mesh. Just know the root will no longer have a translate gizmo because it is the defacto center of your actor.
Now the BP viewport functions mostly like the unity prefab window with a few differences that shouldn’t effect your use case. Here you can either drag in your meshes from the content drawer or manually add them and nest them by hand in the components window in the top left. This window does take into account the pivot of your models so if your pivots are all zeroed out and your pieces in their correct place, they may drag in just fine. If their pivots are based on relative location to their parent piece, you can parent them (by dragging and dropping in the component window) then going back to their details and zeroing them out.
Now remember blueprints aren’t just containers, but also actual classes themselves so you can handle any logic you need on them as well if you want to. Do you need any logic for these or are you just doing a visualization?
I had high hopes for that Blueprint screen. But that’s still not it. The mystery screen had a black background just like that. It also displayed the center (translate gizmo, although I think it was not in color). If I clicked on different folders of the hierarchy the gizmo would display at the respective center (different for each level of the hierarchy).
Could it be that you had imported it as a blueprint through the datasmith plugin or the FBX scene import?
This would have brought everything in with the hierarchy intact and the groups would have their correct pivot (for most configurations).
It apparently was the FBX scene import! I can see each step of the hierarchy. I’m going to play around with this some more, but it looks like this is what I need! I haven’t looked at the datasmith plugin, but I’ll check that out as well.
Thank you, SupportiveEntity!
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