Why does adding a Point Light to an actor's components = Child Actor Component when dragging, but Point Light Component when using "Add Component"?

Development Rendering
, , ,
1

I’ve been following Unreal’s built in tutorial and it suggests 2 ways to add a Cone to an Actor:

  • by using the Add Component button, or
  • by dragging “Cone” from the Modes/Place panel into the actor’s Components panel.

In both cases you get the same thing appearing in the actor’s list of components. That is, a Static Mesh Component.

But if I try the same thing with a Point Light:

  • the one I add with the Add Component button appears in the components list as a Point Light Component.
  • the one I add by dragging from the Modes/Place panel appears in the list as a Child Actor Component instead.

This image shows Point Light item in the Modes panel on the left, the component list for the actor on the right, and the 2 different results of adding a Point Light to that component list.

288954-image-002-20191002.jpg
288954-image-002-20191002.jpg1395×956 203 KB

Question: What is the meaning behind having these different results?

Ie., is there something that makes sense of:

  • the way one approach makes a Child Actor Component with Point Lights and the other doesn’t?
  • the way some items (like Point Lights) do that and others (like Static Meshes) don’t?

(Note: I’m not asking what the 2 results each mean, but rather, what makes it logical/understandable that the 2 results are achieved in these ways, and only for some things.)

Thanks!

2

Ok,
for simplicity sale you may think of Actors as a containers for components.
When you dragging in, you taking this container (in your case with Point Light component inside it) and adding to another container.
ChildActor basically means it’s an Actor added to another Actor as a component:

Actor
    - ChildActor
        |- LightComponent (this is a component of ChildActor)

While adding components directly, you don’t need intermediate container:

Actor
    - LightComponent

Of course in this example it’s redundant to use child actors and you should add your components directly to your main actor. Usually you would want to use child actors when you need to separate big actor into manageable chunks.
But I never happened to use it in projects, nor seen it much in other places. So can’t say if it’s a good way to do that.

3

Thanks. Any idea why it doesn’t make the distinction for a Static Mesh though?