I’ve got a rigid-body animation project that heavily relies on instancing. Everything is made of a set of meshes that are to be arranged manually to create scenes and characters. I would also like to merge static groups of instances to a single mesh for performance and back again for animation or simulation.
So with that simple concept I’ve found Unreal is incredibly ill-equipped to handle extensive use of instances. These are my requirements, I don’t think they are excessive:
- Quick manual placement of instances in the viewport, with alignment tools.
- Transform animation of instances in the viewport, which would be translation, rotation, and scaling.
- Attachment of instances to skeletons, and animation of skeletons.
- Rigid-body transform simulation of instances, again translation, rotation, and scaling.
- Grouping of instances in the viewport.
- Hiding of groups of instances, which should also be unloaded from memory.
- Copying of groups of instances in the viewport.
- Conversion of groups of instances to a single mesh.