Send to Unreal - Discussion - Arrayed static meshes and hierarchical/instanced static meshes

[Feltehs]

Addon: Send To Unreal
Description:
It is common in archviz and other modelling techniques to take a complex mesh and instance it many times. This is possible in two ways inside Blender - array modifiers and alt+d (duplicate instance referencing same base mesh)

Meshes exported from Blender should maintain low polycounts even when used in large quantities (via arraying and instance referencing)

Workflow:

Blender:

• Create a default cube
• Add array modifier (relative offset -> 2 - No merge)
• Alt+D to duplicate an instanced mesh and move 5 units away
• Pipeline -> Export to Unreal

Unreal:

• Current behaviour is to see two meshes produced - with two unique origin positions and 5 sets of polys in that mesh
• Suggested new behaviour is to have a blueprint created including one mesh with a hierarchically instanced mesh in the relevant array positions [Open discussion point as to what outcome people would expect here]

[xivader]

This would be very useful indeed. I totally agree with the suggestion.