Improving work with hierarchy of objects/components

[Tomza]

Hello,

I have been working over big building composed of many elements and I noticed that it’s not easy to work with the hierarchy of objects/components (I mean Outliner and inside Blueprint Window and everywhere where a hierarchy is used in UE4). The perfect example of working with hierarchy is Unity (sorry, but it’s true). A few things to improve according to me :

1/ Clicking on parent object/component holding subobjects/subcomponents and duplicating it, the parent object/component is only duplicated and it should be duplicated with its subobjects/subcomponents

2/ Adding a new object/component is always to the end of hierarchy no matter what element in the hierarchy is highlighted and it should be added in the hierarchy, where the element is highlighted (making a subobject/subcomponent of the highlighted object/element)

3/ Duplicating an element of hierarchy we get the name that is the general type like Static Mesh plus number and it should be the name of duplicated element plus number, for example duplicating LevelOneFloor we should get LevelOneFloor1, LevelOneFloor2, etc.

4/ It would be great to have an empty objects/components to use only for grouping other elements and giving them common features (I know it was a discussion of it, but having such a possibility would be great)

Don’t get me wrong, but it would really improve working with hierarchies. Because I have a long experience with Unity, I see that clearly. Working with hierarchy in Unity is really nice. Of course, we can do that manually, but if you have for example 100 elements in blueprint to assemble a building, working with UE4 hierarchy is a true pain.

[BoredEngineer]

I second that, couple of pawns had over 100 components and it was it really tedious to work with it.
Addition to OP post:

• There is no ability to filter component view list by their class, so if you need to select half of the static mesh components, to change their collision settings, you are up to a !FUN! as selecting directly in viewport is not always possible.
• The only way to group components right now is by inserting Scene Component. This adds additional transform and can lead to issues when you have part of hierarchy with physics enabled components.
• Copy/pasting or duplicating, multiple hierarchically related components doesn’t copy their relation, you just get new components as if they are in the same level of hierarchy.

[Tomza]

@BoredEngineer;620608

I second that, couple of pawns had over 100 components and it was it really tedious to work with it.
Addition to OP post:

• There is no ability to filter component view list by their class, so if you need to select half of the static mesh components, to change their collision settings, you are up to a !FUN! as selecting directly in viewport is not always possible.
• The only way to group components right now is by inserting Scene Component. This adds additional transform and can lead to issues when you have part of hierarchy with physics enabled components.
• Copy/pasting or duplicating, multiple hierarchically related components doesn’t copy their relation, you just get new components as if they are in the same level of hierarchy.

Exactly! Thank you for your words. Unity Team made a great work that the Hierarchy is so friendly to users. I’m assembling a big building of many elements ion UE4 and it’s really tedious. In Unity, I parented hundreds elements and I can’t imagine that process in UE4. UE4 is getting more and more advanced features, but some simple things are missing. I think not much code is needed to make working with hierarchies in UE4 more friendly and convenient.