Hi all, I’m diving into the dark art of modular sets in Unreal and was hoping I could get some advice on the best way to progress.
I have some experience making modular kits in the past, but not for Unreal, so bear with me if I ask something obvious!
Here’s what I need to be able to do.
I’m currently making some very simple corridor titles for a designer to create some dungeon maps.
Here’s what I’ve got so far:
A few wall bits, floor and identical ceiling tiles.
There’s loads of pieces here which is intentional, but I don’t want the designer to have to build their map bit by bit. Its too time consuming. What I’d like the designer to have is modular prefabs so they can quickly assemble their levels and make changes.
Like this corridor prefab for example:
This is made up of 4 pieces - 2 walls, 1 floor piece and 1 ceiling piece.
What I’d like to do is make this into a single asset that lives in the content browser, But - if I make any changes to the mesh, the walls for example, it’ll update.
Based on my current Unreal knowledge:
- If I Group the assets, I can’t save them to the content browser.
- If I Merge Actors, They won’t update if I make changes to the original mesh bits.
- Creating each prefab as a blueprint seems like a bad idea.
I’m unsure how to progress here, any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
So I’ve decided to have a go at making prefabs with blueprints, which seems like a good way to go.
My method is to assemble my prefabs in the viewport, then convert them to an actor blueprint.
A problem I’m encountering by doing this is that the pivot on the blueprint appears to be random. Sometimes it isn’t even aligned to the grid. 
Is there any way to adjust the pivot of the blueprint? Or at the very least, snap it back to the grid?
Thanks.
You’re going to have some significant issues when you get to lighting–each object gets processed by itself and that will cause slight lighting variations which will be very obvious with meshes like that. Also, you get worse performance due to the large number of objects increasing draw calls. Since they are so simple, you would do better to take the minor hit to memory and make more unique complete meshes rather than increasing the draw calls by making them with many meshes.
If you have to use modular objects for your game type then it might be better to use dynamic lighting though it wouldn’t look as nice.
Thanks for the warning! Thats good to know!
This asset set is just for the designer to block out their maps - once they’re happy with the layout, I’ll replace this kit, with larger assets that’ll take up whole corridors etc. Does that sound more performance friendly?
Any ideas on the rogue blueprint pivots?
Thanks 
