Community Tutorial: Importing coordinates for automatic static mesh placement

General Tutorial & Course Discussions
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This tutorial describes a method for importing CSV coordinate data into Unreal Engine, then automatically placing static meshes into your level with scale and rotation randomisation at runtime. The tutorial covers the Blueprint additions of Static Mesh Components, Instanced Static Mesh Components, Hierarchical Instanced Static Mesh Components, and quick distribution of Nanite meshes for UE5 projects.

https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/tutorials/Gj/unreal-engine-importing-coordinates-for-automatic-static-mesh-placement

2 Likes
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Thanks for the great tutorial, but the link stopped working somewhere in the last couple of hours.

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Hi B_de-V, apologies for that. I had to modify part of the tutorial. It’s now back up online!

Kind regards,

Simon

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Thank you for the great tutorial. I was trying to implement it but what if I want to place static meshes on the terrain but I don’t want them to be placed after I press the play button. I want to see them while developing and editing the environment.

Thank you!

1 Like
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Hi @AlexFreeman

Apologies, I’ve just seen this message you left!

If you cut and paste the blueprint contents from your Blueprint Event Graph, over to the Blueprint Construction Script, this will populate the meshes in the editor.

Kind regards,

Simon

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Hi, great tutorial
Just wanted to share old script for Maya that reads transforms from selected objects and writes them to csv. Script is not mine, I used it for Octane render 10 years ago :slight_smile:

octaneInstancer_mel.zip (2.9 KB)

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@xeno.SKB

Hi Simon,

Many thanks for this tutorial. I’m hoping to use it for trees with real world location data I have. I’m half way through the tutorial (producing static meshes) and have a couple of questions.

  1. I set the project to Metres in the Project Settings before I started but all the objects from my CSV are very close together, suggesting they’re appearing in cm locations from the BP actor. I can multiply in excel but it’s not ideal.

  2. Related to Alex’s point, I would like the trees (currently pillars in my test) to be visible in the editor and not just when I press play - and retain their HISM/ISM nature. Is that possible? I copy and pasted the graph into the adjacent Construction Script graph as suggested but it didn’t work. Do I need to hook the Construction Script node up to something?

Look forward to hearing from you.

Regards,

Adam