Trying to build an Actor Replacement tool in Blueprints - Issues and Questions

Hello everyone,

This is my most ambitious Blueprint project yet, and as expected I’m encountering issues. My arch-vis projects typically come from Revit and have thousands of lights, pieces of furniture, equipment, and casework. Each of these is a family in Revit and we also have “render-ready” versions of these models in UE4 with much better geometry/UV’s and PBR materials ready to go.

I dream of a tool where I can click one button and quickly replace all the Revit families with these new models. I built a prototype which does work and a screenshot of the function is attached. This runs in the editor and replaces, for example, all the can lights in my scene with my Blueprint can light. It works by finding objects from Revit with the correct metadata signaling that they are a can light, then spawning my can light Blueprint in their exact location, then hiding the original Revit families.

My main concern with this is by spawning new objects and hiding the old ones, I lose any access to any metadata applied to those original objects and could no longer query this at run-time for any reason. I’d love for there to be a way to transfer or copy metadata from one object to another, but haven’t been able to find it. Has anyone attempted to make a similar tool, or is Epic themselves planning to release something like this in the future?

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, I’m trying to create a similar BP that can replace different plant nodes with plant models. Do you mind sharing a screenshot and I’ll let you know if I have any progress?