Prefab Tool - Prefab Support for Unreal Engine

[Nate]

@ColdIronPoz

Now that we’ve been working with this a little bit, we’ve run across some workflow speed-bumps and thought you might have some ideas about how to overcome them. Or maybe take them as suggestions for future updates.

It’s not obvious when you select an actor that it is part of a prefab. I’ve moved stuff around, saved, and when I re-opened the map the changes are lost because the Prefab is still connected. I can imagine a few ways to approach this workflow problem. One would be to have the actors in the prefab be Grouped using Unreal’s editor groups and have that Group be locked as long as the Prefab is connected. When you try to choose an actor that’s inside that prefab, you’d know immediately that you were doing so. To move things inside the prefab, you’d have to disconnect it. (I assume this behavior would need to be an option for people with other workflows.)

In our workflow, most prefabs should be disconnected because we always tweak the items in it a bit. But by default, dropping in a prefab leaves it connected. There are also times where we do want it connected. It turns out that some prefabs are meant to be used one way and others the other way. So, maybe we could mark a Prefab asset as “is disconnected by default.” (Internally, we call these kinds of prefabs “Stamps”, because you stamp them into the map.) (Or maybe they shouldn’t even be connected any more; I’m not sure about that.)

One more requests since I’m here: Select all siblings/children - If you have a prefab selected, select all the children. If you have a prefab child selected, select all the siblings.

Thanks again for this tool. It is really great.

Thanks a lot for the suggestions.

I like the “stamp” prefab and the select sibling/children ideas, will find a way to implement them in future updates.

For the grouping prefab actors, I actually have once implemented that functionality in early prototype, but remove it since I found grouping not works well when nested. I’ll re-visit the grouping idea, and maybe add it as an experimental feature.