Well this is more like a help-seeking than an acture issue.
Our team is new to UE4 and is trying to do an archviz demo. We always find ourselves facing thousands of pieces of construction parts, most of them are just duplicates, which are geometry instances in 3dsmax.
In normal way, we import every piece to UE, and treat the duplicates as different pieces, but that seems to be a giant waste of memory (or is it not? UE4 seem to did a pretty good job on mesh optimizing)
If I only import one of them into the engine and manually place and rotate them to where they should be, it will take forever and make the job impossible…
So it will be a life-saver if those pieces are also “instances” in UE too,only each piece is on the location where it should be, just like in 3dsmax. Any idea on how to achieve that?
I know BluePrint can automaticly place meshes, but BPs are MOVABLE only, right? I still need those instances to be STATIC meshes, so I can bake light maps on them.
Maybe this is all because I’m doing it wrong, if so, somebody please correct me. thanks a lot!
Oh and please forgive my poor English…
Here’s a screen shot of our project, hope it helps you understand what I am saying.
Yeah, importing those as unique meshes is a big waste of resources. But you’d also want to limit the number of objects as well because each object even if it’s and instance counts as a draw call–instances just limit the amount of memory you use since it only keeps one copy in the memory. With blueprints you can do instancing where it will automatically combine all the instanced meshes, which ruins the memory saving but lowers draw calls.
In your case, there’s a tool for 3ds Max in the Community Content section which can assist you to organize things in 3ds Max and then move them to UE4 while keeping instances and stuff. Introducing 3ds MAX to UE4 FBX and t3d Exporter MaxScript - Community Content, Tools and Tutorials - Unreal Engine Forums
Try to limit the number of objects for each building, and then in your case because you’ve got details that will make it difficult to setup lightmaps I’d try a real-time lighting situation, maybe using the new Distance Field Raytrace Shadows and AO features. Maybe even LPV. Otherwise you will need to spend some time creating lightmap UV’s.
Also, if you’ve got some really simple materials (like just color) you can combine materials into one by making a single texture map that just has color swatches that you need, then you would UV the mesh to use the right color from that texture. That way you could combine meshes if you needed to and would reduce the number of materials.
Thank you so much! That script really helps a lot!
It would be awesome to see the result when you are finished Nevetsieg 
