Hello, all. I’m coming to UE4 from another engine and am confused about some aspects of using a Blueprint to make modular scene geometry. I’m making a dilapidated military-industrial lab interior as a practice project. What I’ve done so far:
- I used the new Modeling plugin to create a support column with some nice insets and bevels to add interest. Initially this column had just one material.
- I used box primitives from the Modeling plugin to create modular concrete wall sections 1200x400x20 cm, then arranged these into a four-room quad.
- I cloned one of the box primitives and used a boolean subtract to cut the rough opening for a door (to be added later) then deployed four copies of this modular wall in the appropriate places.
- I added multiple copies of my support column at all the wall intersections.
- Finally, I selected all of these Actors and created a Blueprint with these as child components.
At this point, what I had was a single Blueprint that instantiates into the level as a four-room lab quad with doors and columns exactly where I wanted them. So far, so good. Next, I did the following:
- Within the Blueprint I created child Scene Actors to group the interior walls, perimeter walls, and columns under separate parents, just to better organize the hierarchy.
- I decided the support columns needed their bases and insets to have color variants of the basic column concrete material, so I used the Details window in the Blueprint editor to locate where the Modeling plugin placed the static mesh for the column. There was (as expected) only one static mesh asset.
- There didn’t seem to be any way to invoke the Modeling mode within the Viewport of the Blueprint Editor, so I instantiated the support column standalone into my level, then used the Modeling mode to edit its poly groups and assign materials. This prototype copy now looks correct. I saved the asset.
- Back in the Blueprint Editor, I verified that the columns in the Blueprint are still pointing at the static mesh asset that I’ve modified, but the ones in the Blueprint not only don’t have the new material, but in fact they don’t have the extra material slots I added on the static mesh asset itself.
I’m trying to figure out how to tell the Blueprint editor to “refresh” all of those static mesh assets into itself.
The overall intent here is that the Blueprint should represent a grouping of static mesh (and other) Actors and their relative transforms from the Blueprint’s own pivot (origin) point. I don’t want the Blueprint to think of itself as the “creator” of those static mesh Actors.
Thanks for anyone who can spend a moment pointing me in the right direction. What am I overlooking about how Blueprints are supposed to work?
One other question about the editor UI: The World Hierarchy shows all those static mesh components beneath each instance of the Blueprint, but they’re not selectable from there. Is there an easy way to hide those in the World Hierarchy to avoid making it too long, and have that window show only the Blueprint root?