If i alt+drag in the editor, does that create an instance of the mesh or a copy?
I have loads and loads of the same mesh in my scene and im wondering if they are actually instances.
Is there a way to tell?
Thanks
Jack
Huh…never knew you could do that…looks like you can do the alt-drag trick on anything–lights, placeblueprints, etc…which makes me think it’s just a copy.
When you place meshes, it -always- says “instance” in the details panel… i think that’s just an “instance” of the staticmeshcomponent, which is probably some indication of the mesh management that UE4 does under the hood, only sending one copy to the GPU and such (so, reusing the same mesh saves lots of memory, for example, and is a good idea)…however, that’s not the same thing as the huge arrays of the things actually called “instanced-static-meshes” that you can make in blueprint or code, or the same thing as the terrain’s instanced grass meshes that can be batched into fewer draw calls…the editor actually gives very minimal control over each individual instance in those cases. So, consider your meshes at full cost for drawcall and viewable-vertex-count costs.