How to procedurally add components to a Blueprint in C++?

Development Programming & Scripting C++
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1

Hi, first, let me give a little explanation of what I want to accomplish:

I want to add multiple components (both SceneComponents and ActorComponents) to my Actor Blueprint, programmatically, before using it. These components are used for gameplay logic.

For example:

Starting with the following actor:

Actor 
Actor
└─RootComponent
  ├─Group1
  │ └─StaticMesh1
  └─Group2
    └─StaticMesh2
└─ActorComponent1

I can create a Blueprint based on it using FKismetEditorUtilities::CreateBlueprintFromActor. This would give me the following blueprint:

Blueprint 
Blueprint
└─RootComponent
  ├─Group1
  │ └─StaticMesh1
  └─Group2
    └─StaticMesh2
└─ActorComponent1

Let’s say I wanted to add a gameplay component as parent of group 1 like so:

Added gameplay component 
Blueprint
└─RootComponent
  ├─GameplayComponent1
  │ └─Group1
  │   └─StaticMesh1
  └─Group2
    └─StaticMesh2
└─ActorComponent1

To add such a component to an actor, I would simply get its root component, find the ‘Group1’ component, and add my gamplay component as a parent (making sure to add it as children of the old parent, in this case RootComponent).

I haven’t found any straight forward way to do so inside the BP.

Here is what I tried:

  • Modifying the generated class’s CDO. While this looks like an easy and straight forward solution, I did not find any way to access the component hierarchy from the CDO (it has no components).

  • Modifying the SCS. This worked to an extent, but is way too complicated. This should be a last resort.

  • Adding the components prior to converting to a blueprint: this was my initial approach, but I realized that the references I added inside those component were invalid after the conversion. Trying to fix the references is as bad as adding the components themselves.

If anyone of you knows a way to do this, or knows how to easily manipulate a SCS and USCS_Nodes, please help me.

Thanks a lot in advance.

2

Not an answer but I just wanted to point out: Your question doesn’t seem to appear in the C++ category because you used the cpp tag instead of the c++ tag. (Yes, EPIC’s forum team is kind of a let down with its handling of categories)

3

Thanks for the heads up, I indeed used the general Programming category instead of the C++ one (not a tag though). This one is on me