1.1.3 with 4.14 support is now live on the Marketplace.
1.1.3.1 update is now live on both Unreal Engine Marketplace and itchi.io.
It fixed a user reported bug when enabling actor viewport select might cause editor out of memory due to early cancel of undo transaction.
Hi Nate, I just bought your plugin and I already love it, so convenient and easy to use.
I have one issue though. I don’t know if this even makes sense but when I instance a static mesh that I have previously mirrored (Transform -> Mirror X/Y/Z) the normals gets flipped when I later turn it into an instance with your plugin.
It’s not a huge issue and I could alter my work flow to avoid it (I’m building half an apartment building and then mirror it to create the other half) but it would be great if this could be avoided somehow.
Thanks!
@Sitrec, so glad you like it!
The issue you noticed is a long overdue UE4 bug: (Instanced Static Mesh Bug - Asset Creation - Unreal Engine Forums)
Basically negative scale is not yet supported in instanced static mesh rendering.
One thing I did noticed is that if you change scale value to negative value through Instanced Static Mesh Component’s Instances array property, the editor will “secretly” change it back to positive value. I thought about doing the same thing when converting instances, but decided against it because that means user might miss the chance to correct the mirrored instances.
There’s one workaround though, merge all meshes with positive scale into one instanced actor, then select and change all meshes with negative scale to positive scale and merge them into another instanced actor, then change the instanced component’s scale to negative which will make all instances be mirrored.
Ah I see, I’ll try that. Thank you! This tool is going to help my workflow so much.
Instance Tool updated to 1.1.4.
Now you can specific pivot for converted instance actor: Selection Center / Last Selected Acor / World Space Zero.
Please note that “Last Selected Actor” could be any actor (don’t have to be actor with static mesh component), so you can choose any actor to act as pivot for converted instance actor.
I just made a simple scene to showcase how to use blueprint to update transform of instances from HISMC through instance id.
You don’t need Instance Tool for this approach, though it helps for inspecting the instance id.
You can get the project it from here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B53kZZcHY08nLXVOTWhWZjJZbzA
Also posted it in community content sectioon: https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?136580-Use-Blueprint-with-Instances-from-Hierarchical-Instanced-Static-Mesh-Component
Hello, hello!
Love this tool! Unfortunately, I tried installing Instance Tool 1.1.4 into Engine 4.14.3 on my Mac today and it wouldn’t install. I dug in to see what was causing the compile error (only on the Mac, it works fine under Windows for me). Two changes were required to get it to compile on the Mac:
In InstanceToolEdMode.cpp, I needed to explicitly import:
#include "Components/HierarchicalInstancedStaticMeshComponent.h"
then at Line 154 in the same file, I had to include the template keyword to make Clang happy:
if (!SourceComponent->GetClass()->template IsChildOf<T>())
With those two changes in place, the plugin compiles on the Mac just fine.
@, sorry for the compile error on Mac and thanks a lot for the fixes! I’ll include your fixes in next update, it sure will help other Mac users out there, thanks again! Sorry that I’m not able to test on Mac myself. (My Mac is stuck in osx 10.8 and is not powerful enough to handle UE4 anyway)
if (!SourceComponent->GetClass()->template IsChildOf<T>())
For anyone who might be curious about the fix posted here, SourceComponent here is a parameter depends on type T, IsChildOf is a member template function depends on the template parameter SourceComponent, in this case, C++ standard requires the template keyword be used as prefix of the member templae function.
No apologies necessary, Nate. InstanceTool is a great plugin and I only posted in case there were other people trying to use it on the Mac.
But, if you ever want someone to sanity check future releases, let me know, I’m happy to do a sanity compile for you. 
@, thanks a lot for your kind offer! I’m talking to unreal marketplace support see if anything could be done from their side.
I posted an example project couple days ago to demostrate how to use blueprint to update HISMC instance transform. The idea is simple, the blueprint only contains logic, the actual mesh is stored in a HISM actor. The drawbacks is that you have to assign instance id to each blueprint instances manually, which is tedious and error prone.
So there’ll be a new feature coming to rescue:
The process is that you select the blueprint, tell Instance Tool the variable name which suppose to hold the HISM instance id, select the HISM instances, press “Spawn” to spawn blueprint actors with HISM instance id auto assigned to the blueprint variable.
Looks great! When this update will be available. please?
@tukor, the feature is almost done, I just need to do more test and finish the icon.
What about draw distance? Is it possible to assign it per single instance and not for all the instances together?
Hi @ginwakeup, not sure I understand the “draw distance” question. For spawn blueprint and auto assign instance id feature, it’ll spawn blueprints base on your instance selection, say you selected 1 mesh instance, then 1 blueprint actor will be spawned; 2 mesh instance selected, 2 blueprint actors will be spawned.
No, I mean this:
I need the instances to cull separately, because at the moment the desired max draw distance is making all my instances popping out together when I am far away from the pivot of the HISM.
Oh, I thought you are asking about the Instance Tool.
What version are you using? Have you tried setting Instance Cull Distance?
Here’s a simple test I just did on 4.14.3
A heads up, the price of Instance Tool will be 14.99 start from next 1.2.0 update.
1.1.5 update for 4.15 is now live on both Unreal Engine Marketplace and itchi.io.
Hi Nate, thank you for the reply. That’s what I needed!