Instanced static mesh manipulation

[ZoltanJr]

I am currently creating an object in blueprint which spawns anywhere between 1 and 200 odd instances of a static mesh. I am positioning these in a radius around the root object at different orbits.

What I am trying to do is have them animate in different orbits around the root object, picture electrons going around in an atom.

Is there any way that I can achieve this through instanced static meshes?

An alternative I have done is just by spawning 2 static meshes for each object, 1 at the centre and 1 where I want it to be (where the instanced mesh would be) and parenting it to the centre object and rotating that. While this works somewhat it is very inefficient when you now have up to 500 static meshes attempting to spawn and then animate so it destroys the frame rate.

[Cultrarius]

I don’t think it is possible to move each instance independently. You can only move the parent component, so all of them move at once.

Maybe you can achieve what you are trying to do with particles? You can have particles orbiting around a center and you can have mesh particles.

[ZoltanJr]

@Chariots;280044

This might do the trick: Update Instance Transform | Unreal Engine 5.2 Documentation But you’ll have to manage the instance transforms individually yourself.

Thanks I gave that a try and have them all animating around, just need to figure out a way to set their orbital direction properly based on it’s position relative to the root object. Anybody have some mathgic to do this? Im a bit weak on the whole SIN,COS translation stuff.

@Cultrarius I did also consider doing it with particles but I hadn’t progressed further with that at the moment since I may want to do things with each of the individual parts of it which I don’t think I could do with particles?