I have an object with lots of bolts/nuts… They are instanced in Sketchup and imported into UE4… I’m wondering if I can somehow convert these nuts/bolts back into instances in UE4 to save memory while maintaining their position?
You can try exporting to FBX and use the FBX Scene Import option:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Content/FBX/FullScene/
But I would suspect that it won’t work.
Also consider whether you need that, that sounds like small details that really shouldn’t be separate objects, if they don’t need to be high detail I would either bake them into a normal map on the main object they would be attached to or I would at the very least reduce the poly count to a very simple cylinder and then attach several of them together–each object is a draw call so you want to keep the number of things low, and if they aren’t particularly high poly then it’s better to attach some of them to a single object and take the minor memory hit rather than have many more draw calls.
I know that 3ds Max imports sketchup files with instances properly, and exporting to FBX with 3ds max you can preserve instances and have that imported in UE4.