Duplicating / copying along spline / path

Development Programming & Scripting Blueprint
1

Hi all,

I have a couple of questions:

  1. Lets say I have to create 100 of objects/static meshes/lights/whatever around an organically/random shaped object, but the distance among all the objects is the same.
    In 3D applications such as 3Ds Max, you can simply create a spline, select the object you want to duplicate and say make X amount of copies of the path. Can I do such a thing in UE4?

  2. Can I make instances in UE4? So changing 1 copy changes everything else? I know you can do this with blueprints and static objects, but what if it was something like a light?

Thanks.

2

  1. You can create splines in UE4 and place objects along/around them. There is a good tutorial for this in the tutorial section by dokipen. You can either use the splines procedurally during runtime, or play with them in construction script for in-editor tinkering.

  2. I know you can do this with dynamic material instances and material parameter collections, but I don’t think that extends to actual meshes. You will have to tell your meshes/actors to update specifically using event dispatchers or other forms of mass communication.

3

Thanks for that. I’ll take a look.

TBH, it might just be easier to model each element (grass, pavement etc) as one massive mesh and hope for the best.

4

There’s one problem I have with this. You may beable to tinker as much as you want in the editor to create your roads and walls and so on, but where the export option to export your finished splines out so you can load them into other projects?, when i click on the spline. Why dosen’t Unreal Engine remember all the spline points you laid down and allow you to just migrate the whole thing out into another project or at least give you the option of turning it into a static mesh AND REMEMBERING all the textures that was put on it, not just turn it into a static mesh and lose all the texture information when you turn textured BSP’s into static meshes. that function is not working properly.