Scene Outliner suggestions

General Feedback & Requests
1

Hi guys,

Very much enjoying getting to know UE4, but of course there are always gremlins

One of the weak points is the Scene Outliner. I have a few suggestions/requests that would improve it a lot with little (easy for me to say) effort:

  1. Allow multiple selection hiding (select many objects, click eyeball)
  2. Allow us to Filter the Outliner contents (e.g. the same way we can filter the Content Browser)
  3. Put extra toggles, i.e. IsVisible (or Actor Visible In Game)
  4. For lights, perhaps put a coloured box next to the light name indicative of it’s colour.
  5. Allow drag & drop from the Content Browser to the Outliner - objects auto placed at relative world center instead of cursor position.
  6. Make UNDO work to Undo large selections of objects dragged into the map (only works on 1 object at a time at the moment).

Any of these would be a huge improvement, all of them would be ace :wink:

2

I am new to UE4 so maybe it is already posible and I just don’t know:

Allow folders to logically group item for example take a little village: Have walls, roof and interior grouped in a folder hut and all huts in a folder village1

3

You can parent objects the same as you can in Unity (I see you’re a Unity user from another post).

Ctrl-G of course to parent selected to a dummy/null object (or a Target Point) would be good.

Edit: Just discovered you can’t parent objects to Target Points.

However Ctrl-G also already groups objects, but they remain loose in the Scene Outliner - so really we just need a way to collapse groups? (+/-)

4

I dont think just to collapse UE4 groups would be enough. I realy would like to see a way (doesn’t have to be folders) to arange objects in the scene outliner the way I want to. Have all walls together or all doors with a special behavior…it depends on personal preference. Yust a plain list with UE4 Group information isn’t enough.

I would like to see the Scene Outliner the way the Content Browser is organized (new folder as an option) and organize objects (I dont want to use the word group because its taken by CTRL-G) as I want to.

5

I would definitely second on the idea of having collapsible groups (parented to a null or a folder).

I’ve read somewhere that that’s coming in a later build. So it seems to be on the radar of the Epic guys already.

cheers,
Michael

6

When you create a group, it creates a GroupActor object (easy to miss as it appears at the very bottom of the Outliner). This already has a RMB ‘Groups’ menu (i.e. Lock options), so I guess the simplest solution would be something akin to a “Hide Contents in Outliner” toggle. But if they’re already on a solution then smart :slight_smile:

7

I really DID miss that GroupActor node! Really nifty would be if it would actually act as a parent to its parts, enabling us to build hierarchies with collapsible / nested groups. But its a start :slight_smile:

8

I agree IMX. I find the flat list in Outliner to be really limiting. Layers are good and Grouping seems ok, but overall it lacks the power of a scene graph hierarchy, where whole branches can be transformed, toggled, and addressed independently.

9

A new Scene Outliner folder organization system has been implemented, and will be available in the next release. Thanks for your feedback!

–Mike