Good question, let me first post a quote from the dead island article, which by the way convinced me that it’s worthy to bring back prefab support to UE4:
While Blueprint and Prefab can both be used to host child actors, there’re couple differences:
- Prefab is created from the level editor and edited in place in the same level editor
- Prefab instances are just normal actors in the level, there’s no class generated, no compilation needed
- Prefab can host any type of actors supporting scene hierarchy (can be attached to other actor), and can be nested to form complex structure
- Prefab is an editor-only tool, you can spawn blueprint instance in runtime, but can only spawn prefab instances in editor
Basically the idea of Prefab is to be used as a level constructing helper. If you’re already comfortable with using Blueprint to host child actors in your workflow, then probablly there’s no need for a Prefab solution.
No special resources needed, both Prefab Actors and it’s Children Actors are just normal actors.
When dragging a Prefab into level, a Prefab Actor will be created, then all actors saved in the prefab will be created as children of the Prefab Actor. The Prefab Actor is essentially an empty actor (with editor-only logic to manage children actors), and can be convert to normal actor later if you choose to. And you can also choose to delete the Prefab Actor after placement if you don’t need the actor hierarchy.
You can make a prefab from the 3 cube actors, and then update the cube actors with final static mesh later.