http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/StaticMeshMode.html
That hasn’t been implemented yet in UE 4 SDK, or am I just blind?
Based on the silence, I take it it’s not in.
Does anyone from Epic know if such a tool is on the backlog?
Take a look in Quick Settings in your main toolbar above the viewport, there is something called “Enable Vertex Snapping” in the Snapping section. I believe that is what you are looking for ?
When starting UE4, the tools team at Epic decided that this feature was not in enough of a polished state to carry it forward with the new engine. Our thought was that the new Placement mode would eventually be extended to have features similar to the old Static Mesh Mode, but we haven’t had a chance to implement that yet. What specific features are you missing the most? We can certainly look at where this feature lands on our roadmap.
–Mike
I would basically like to basically scatter relatively big props around.
Dragging and dropping static meshes on the level (or right click -> add) is too slow (just holding S or alt+S and clicking on surfaces was **fast **) and even then I have to randomly rotate and scale the smeshes around so they wouldn’t look so repetitive. I could probably use foliage as a substitute, but lighting on foliage doesn’t look as good as on static meshes so I can’t really use it.
The random rotation and scale options in UDK’s static mesh mode were also invaluable.
Gotcha. One idea we experimented was allowing you to activate a placeable asset by clicking on it’s icon in the Placement window to go into a “stamping” mode. While it was “active”, every click in the viewport would drop a new instance of the object, so you could stamp down lots of copies very quickly. We had some feedback that people preferred the workflow of dragging and dropping instead, so we turned that off. It’s hard to think of a way to bring that feature back that is also very discoverable to the user and doesn’t make the experience of dragging and dropping confusing. For example, we could let you Shift+Click on the placeable icon to activate the stamping mode above, but it wouldn’t be very obvious to the user. We could have a separate button on the interface that switches between the two modes though, maybe?
–Mike
Or maybe add a paint tool for static meshes. Similar workflow as with painting foliage, except that you’d paint smeshes? Though I’m not sure how that would work with surfaces other than landscape.
@DarkVeil, I don’t know if it’s been there all the time, but I noticed if you right click on an actor type in the Place Mode window (in 4.15), it highlights like it is selected for some purpose. Is that left over from what you were talking about? I don’t suppose there is any (hidden?) way to then place that selected actor with a key+click?
If you were worried about it causing confusion or not being intuitive, you could always just add a command that by default isn’t used, but can have a key bound to it. In fact, I guess highlighting it in the Place Mode window isn’t even necessary, the class or mesh can be selected in the content browser (like UE3).
I too really miss being able to place things about with a key, so much more immersive than having to take your eyes off the scene to find your asset and then drag n drop (not to mention just faster).