I’m looking for an equivalent of Blender or Unity ‘Empty’ object, i.e. a way to parent an arbitrary group of scene objects to a single parent object with controllable transform (position, rotation, scale).
I tried searching around but failed to find much info on the topic. Every remotely relevant shred of info seems to point to something called “Scene Component”, apparently a special UE object with similar functionality.
However I can’t find Scene Component in the UE 5.1 scene ‘Add’ drop down list.
I’m kind of confused, can someone please point in the right direction? I believe I’m missing something rather obvious here. This sounds like a very common basic functionality yet not immediately obvious how to do it in UE.
Scene component is indeed like an empty in Blender, but you can only use it in actors (I think you’re trying to place it in the level if you’re not finding it)
Still missing something. I’m clicking the + button in the toolbar, looking through every object category and can’t locate Scene component in the add dropdown list. Quick search in the list brings some unrelated classes (screenshot below). Apart from this undiscoverable Scene object any other object from the list can be added to scene just fine.
You are trying to add it to the level, and this is not supported.
Scene Component is an actor component and can only be added to an actor, you can’t place components directly in the level viewport.
You could achieve something similar creating an empty actor and dragging other objects inside it (in the details panel) but if you explain what you need to do, there’s probably a better solution
Coming from other 3D tools, I was intuitively expecting that level Outline view is essentially the complete scene hierarchy. As adding basic primitives such as e.g. cube, sphere to the level itself worked fine. Even parenting one primitive by dragging it over another in the Outline worked fine same as in any other 3d tool.
But to recreate functionality of a generic “Empty” object found in many other 3d tools with its own editable transform that can hold an arbitrary hierarchy of children objects I apparently need to use an “Actor” object.
Actually I tried Actor when tinkering before but not realised adding children objects need to be done in a separate Details view. Which is confusing since these same child objects can also be added to the level itself via + dropdown button in the toolbar or by simply dragging them in e.g. meshes from content browser.
