Convert an Actor Blueprint to a Light Weight Instance

Development World Creation
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1

Is there a way to convert a bunch of actor blueprints into “Light Weight Instances” in the editor?

2

Hi Sean3Dmonkey,

Kind of - you can select the blueprint actor in the scene, then select “Merge Actors” from the “Tools” menu (Thanks Epic, that’s an awesome tool!). That creates a new Mesh with all the meshes the blueprint asset has, combined.

Then you can create ISM’s with that, and/or convert it to nanite.

3

May I ask a couple more questions?

  1. Does UE scene editor have a way of filtering the Outliner so I can select all the actor Blueprints as an “Actor Blueprint” type? So I can select them all at once.

2.Do I need to select all the Actor Blueprints, use the “Merge Actors” tool and the tool will convert everything I selected into a Light Weight Instance?

4
  1. Not that I’m aware of. What I usually do is name things in such a way that I can filter by the names.
  2. Yes, it merges all the selected blueprints into just one Static Mesh. From that mesh you can either paint with the Foliage Tool or create instances from a blueprint.
5

Sorry, I don’t think I wrote my intent well enough…Please allow me to re-word my intent.

  1. I have one static mesh in an actor blueprint.
  2. I have hundreds of those “individual” actors blueprints.
  3. I think “Light Weight Instances” will help me save more computer resources. So I think converting the hundreds of individual actor blueprints to Light Weight Instances will help.
  4. Can I select all my actor blueprints and turn them into “Light Weight Instances?”
6

If they’re only one mesh then the best bet would be to just make the blueprints spawn an ISM - if you make a “base” blueprint and reference that from each of the other blueprints, they can share the initial StaticMesh in an InstancedStaticMeshComponent in that base, and create an instance for itself from that.

7

If I spawn the ISM at runtime, would I have to enter the coordinates of all the actor blueprints by hand so the ISMs know where to spawn?
There are hundreds of these actor blueprints.

8

You’re spawning the ISM from the actual actor blueprints, so you’d just have the spawn pass in the actors world space location - easy peasy…

9

Thank you, it took me a while to wrap my head around the concept.

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