I migrated the HAL user interface from the last version available to the version I used for this project (4.16) and it does work fine except for the automatic render stage that renders the preview images for swapping meshes and materials So I had to place those thumbs manually.
I got HAL working the same way in 4.17 and 4.18 but I couldn’t use any of these newer versions because 4.17 breaks the instance static mesh actors and 4.18 breaks the lighting scenarios.
At the end I decided to make my own interface. Here are the reasons:
- potential clients I showed the project were complaining about the interface. It does look a bit dated and with all the cool features it has it often lets people get lost in the sub menus and they get stuck and keep running around with the camera controls on or other weird things. So I generally wanted to make the controls as simple as possible.
- swapping materials and meshes require to replace the mesh with a blueprint and that means having to rebuild the lighting. (Especially bad when you have multiple lighting scenarios). It also requires those meshes to be dynamic. So I decided to just swap materials (although you could potentially swap meshes by using different lighting scenario).
- can only swap individual objects but most clients prefer to have two or more color schemes instead. They want a lot of objects to swap the materials at the same time. Otherwise you can end up having a lot of colors or assets selected that don’t match.
- wanted to swap the static lighting with “lighting scenarios” from day to sunset to night on the fly.