I would like to see additional ways of mass selecting and editing actors beyond the current set of features. I write this with a background of working with environments, often consisting of thousands of actors, and a few simple changes and additions to the existing tools would make a major difference to someone in my line of work.
While I thoroughly went through all menus and features I may have missed certain existing functionality.
Matrix
The Property Matrix is awesome, but I could really use:
- Ability to select actors in the level through the Property Matrix. That way it would allow me to select all lights with brightness 4 for example, and delete or copy all of those. Something possible in UE3 through Shift clicking a property, but does not seem possible here.
- The ability to have the Property Matrix refresh when you select other actors in the level. This would give similar functionality as the property favorites in UE3. The property favorites allowed me to always have a couple of the most common properties appear at the top of the property window. If the Property Matrix would update, you’d get similar functionality out of it (the 5 or so tagged properties show up isolated from the long list of other properties).
Layers
- The layer system in Unreal has always felt like an underdevelopped bit for me. It was originally called groups, which was then renamed to layers a year or two ago, but it aren’t really layers either. It is more of Selection Set than anything else, given an actor can be in many groups at the same time, and given that a layer by name implies that the order of the layers is important. Which is not true. This is confusing to new users to my experience.
Scene Outliner
It is nice to see an outliner in Unreal but:
- If you’d have thousands of actors in a level this would quickly become difficult to deal with. It could really use a folder and tree system, like Photoshop/file explorers/etc. Being able to right click and create a new folder, or a folder within a folder, being able to select meshes and drag them onto a folder, etc. would greatly help with organizing the scene. I have worked with this kind of setup in in-house engines, and it went far smoother once we had a solid folder structure in.
– Apparently when meshes are attached to each other, they show up as children to the parent they are attached to, which comes close to what I am after, but then when I move the parent actor all the children move along, and seemingly without giving me an option somewhere to allow me to edit just the position of the parent? This makes me think this functionality is a by-product and not intentional? I then added a bunch of Note actors to act as parents to my actors in the scene, as I’d never be moving those note actors, but not sure if this is your idea about how this will be used? Feels a bit improvised. - There is no way of seeing which actors are hidden, and which are visible. The outliner always displays everything the same. 3DSMax Scene Explorer solves the hidden problem in an elegant way by simply making the text italic of the object that is hidden in the scene, or by darkening the font like you currently already do when you turn off Group Selection.
- When you group actors, they remain separated in the Outliner, and a GroupActor shows up, further adding to the clutter. It would be nice if when grouped, they show up as items beneath a collapsable Group Actor. Being able to then rename the name of the Group Actor would make it even better. If I currently rename the group actor I also change the name of everything within the group, which is likely not desirable.
