So, I am extremely new to Unreal Editor and Unreal Engine, but I have been given a task to move one of our projects away from a deprecated proprietary engine into Unreal.
One of the tasks that needs to be completed is exporting models from this other engine’s model editor, which can export FBX, and import these into Unreal.
One problem is that upon exporting the FBX file from the other editor, there are things built into that model editor that the engine can manipulate directly from the editor (like turning on/off faces/meshes). But, Unreal doesn’t understand this functionality.
Instead, after just manually importing these FBX files into Unreal, I came up with a way to make the blueprint actor inherit from a base blueprint type that stores some data and then uses the construction script of the FBX imported blueprint to get references and assign variables and accomplish some of these turning on/off faces/meshes.
The top picture is the ConstructionScript of my FBX Imported object while the bottom two pictures are the two functions of my baseAircraft blueprint which the first blueprint inherits from:
The hierarchy contains an empty scene component called gear that stores the static meshes and I use the above functions to get a ref to this empty component and toggle the gears on/off. The problem with this is this is a very manual way of doing this.
So, I found out in Unreal, you can create these Editor Utility Blueprints and make them perform actions against blueprints in an automated way. This way, we can import the FBX, then just right click the blueprint and select Scripted Asset Action > XYZ Script and it will just perform all of what we need.
The problem I am running into, I can’t find out how to make a blueprint script that modifies another blueprint’s function (in this case, ConstructionScript) to perform what I want. We have over 1000+ models that will need to be imported, thus doing this in a manual way is very, very inefficient.
Is there any additional information/documentation/help that someone can point me to in how to make a scripted asset action that modifies another blueprint’s function? What is possible, is it even possible? Or is there a better way to do this?