Efficient Set Dressing with the Actor palette | Unreal Engine 5.2

hi everyone today we are going to be looking at some hidden tools that unreal has that have been around since I believe the beginning uh when it was first released but um what it's done is it's increased my workflow when it comes to Kit bashing and creating elements for for my world uh so with that being said we're going to be looking at three things that have completely increased uh my efficiency when it comes to building a world uh so um what's going on on screen right now is a couple of the things that I've been able to create very quickly and I've been able to place it around in my world to create a little Vistas like right now it's still in its beginning stages where I've just done sort of a first pass over uh over the meshes um but uh you'll be able to see exactly how I've been able to create them so just give me a sec I'm going to jump into unreal and let's get started okay we are in unreal so what I have open right now is a house building level it's basically a neutral scene uh that will I use for look Dev and where it just contains a couple calibration tools as well as a scale reference for a six foot person um but uh what we're going to want to do for the first tool is we're going to want to go ahead and go into our edit plugins and we're going to look for the actor pallette which should by default be the second one in our little chain here so uh once it's activated and you restart uh we're ready to go and um how we're going to be able to find this tool is once it's active we should be able to find it under Tools here and under this very first section for tools at the very top um and you can see it created this thing for actor pallette and I'm just going to click number one now you might be seeing something interesting interesting here is that it's asking us to choose a level or to open a level now check this out I'm going to open up a level I specifically made for uh for assets right so I'm going to open up the medieval Farm Village which is a asset zoo that I created that holds every single asset that I I use in order to Kit bash my my farm houses so you can already see how useful this is is that you're going to be able to have sort of reference characters in here uh for scale as well as just seeing all your assets without having to drag them out in order to sort of see them in context now uh this is also very handy because even though this one is made by me you can also load one that is you know an overview map in one of the asset packs but why is this so cool well check this out so I'm going to select select a mesh right here and I'm just going to left click and I'm going to drag it in as simple as that we're able to take something from this Zoo level and bring it into our main level for building and I'll do that again just a simple left click and we're dragging it in right obviously though is like um we're getting a little lighting error just because I have lights in here but uh you can see that now I can just simply drag it into the level and let me actually zero this out on my podiums here just so I can get them to line up properly I think that's all right and from here I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to build right so you can see I got one two meshes and I'm just going to build a house this way right and you know um with this uh little setting is it makes it obviously as you can probably tell a lot easier when it comes to creating a house so I'm just going to add my four walls and I'll just speed up this section just so that it's a little bit easier for you guys to see and don't have to sit through me adding meshes e okay so this is the uh the ending of our little house that we created just through literally kit bashing it from this little a pet here now you might be wondering is like all right so you did all that so what's what's the point it's like uh it exists in this level what can we do with it we could you know like we could do it the whole thing where we uh create a new level and we you know we put it in there and then we can only use it once well that isn't the best way of working I'm just going to close this down and let's let's begin talking about the next step so the thing is is that there's a new way of working using packed level actors and what these are is it essentially allows us to make instances of a level so in other words I can take a house that I made and I can create a blueprint out of it that is essentially a level so you can see I did it with this one I did it with this one I did it with you know the dock here and I've done it with the houses right all of this stuff are levels that I can not only edit but that I can place repeatedly so how can I make one well that's it's actually pretty easy so knowing what we have here right um we're going to just go ahead and we are going to just select everything that I know is going to be in the level here right everything we place and I'm just going to right click and now uh after right clicking there's this level option under here now there's an option for create level instances which just sort of creates a level in place with all these items whereas the create packed level actor creates a blueprint of this right so let me just I'm going to create a packed level actor and it's going to ask me where I want to set the pivot uh in this case it's going to be the minimum center right on the Z so it's going to move it to the center uh we also have a couple options where it's just the absolute Center of everything or uh just of the actor or the world origin right I I built this on the world origin basically um sort of like 50 cm up but I'm just going to choose uh centerman for now and I'm going to show you guys how to edit this later but I'm going to do that and I'm going to hit okay and it's going to ask me to save a map right and uh what I'm going to do is I'm going to call this pla uh demo Hut uh three because I already made one and I'm going to now it's asking me to save a a blueprint and I'm just going to call this one level instance uh I probably have them backwards but you know what it's fine and what I'm going to do is I'm just going to place it into this uh little list of other uh ones that I have created as you see so I'm going to do that and now we now you can see it's all collapsed now into this one actor right and it's packed so what exactly does that mean well obviously it's all put into one right and you can see here that I'm just going to open up the map separately I'm going to look for demo demo Hut 3 I'm going to open it up I'm just going to go into unlit mode so you can see sort of what's going on so you can see that it is now like a you know just the house by itself typically how it would be if we just made a level or put it into a level but let's look at the really cool thing here so I'm going back to the uh the house building and I'm going to navigate to where I had the blueprint for this thing so demo House 3 was it right now check this out so obviously we need to fix the pivot but you can see that we can actually place this house several times over and you know it's the same house obviously but it allows us to like say if we just made background buildings look how fast we just made them and how we don't even have to merge them together and say I wanted to make a change to one of these such as with the pivot which we'll do in a second is that all we have to do is we can actually go into each and every single one of these quite easily right so you see how I have it selected if you look underneath the details panel there is this edit option right and we're just going to click on this and what it will do is it will gray out everything that is not within its current context meaning only the things that are inside the packed level actor are going to be uh you know more or less colored and you know more visible and vibrant as you can see here and you can see that we have access now to every single mesh in here now there is a bit of a caveat to this is that say I duplicate I want this house to have two uh two chimneys right and if I just uh press Escape twice uh to save it now every single house has a chimney now why is that well it's because we updated the actual map that these are contained in so in other words that if you want to make you know make changes to to the house it will propagate to all of them but say if you want to have one specific you know a unique one it kind of makes it difficult right you'd kind of have to build a house from scratch again or you can do it the other way which is where you just right click on it go down the level and you can break it and this if I just hit yes you can see it broke it right all those pieces are now out in our main map but now I can actually go ahead and freely make uh make as many changes as I want to this thing right and what will happen is that because these are levels all I have to sorry these are assets again all I have to do is Select them again let me just make deselect this guy and and then just do the whole process again of right clicking and creating a Pack level instance in this case I'm just going to create a level instance because I'm actually just going to delete this right afterwards so I'm just going to call it to delete bad spelling and yeah so it created a uh level right in its place um so that is sort of um you know sort of a a work around for it and you can see here we have two chimneys whereas the other ones don't but let's go ahead and see why it would be useful kind of doing um doing it the other way where we actually edit the level itself so let's look at this pivot which is um way off right it's at the Min z uh so all I have to do because this one's actually really easy is that this one's at um at this point like I don't want to sort of you know reset it because now it's over here uh all I actually want to do because this is the center I know it's 50 cm up because of how it is on the cylinder where I build it so I'm just going to put 50 and what should happen when I hit Escape I'm not going to hit apply because um if I did that it would just kind of reset it to the other option but you can see that is now at 50 it's a little bit off but that's because we have it up off the ground a bit um we're probably going to have to edit this just a little bit more um let's bring it up here so like say 25 I don't know why but it's there and now it's on the ground but um say you know this is first pass and now we're ready for a second pass well here's also the cool thing you can actually have multiple Pack level actors in one so it's just be warned it's actually going to um it's actually going to edit those things as well if you say open it up and byy itself you know sort of like what we just did so what I'm going to do let me just reset this pivot again I was a little bit off um let's go and set that to zero there we go and uh what we can do is I'm actually going to go in and I'm going to grab uh one of these platforms that I made I'm going to take it and I'm just going to drag it in it's pretty big right but that's not the point we're just going to shove it in here so that we can make a little bit of a you know a little patio right maybe we can even have a little little thing in the background maybe not this one uh let's grab this and like almost like a scaffolding type of thing where you know it will not only sort of be here maybe off the back you know it'd be kind of cool if for some for whatever reason you know like uh things were being stacked like this on top of it right well check this out so if this was the our next step in making this you know more polished then all we have to do is hit yep and now you can see it's on every single one of these right that's pretty cool right but again the issue here is that say I edit this this man bridge that we just did and let me just do that I'm just going to uh you know make this uh duplicate it and make it bigger now I'm just going to hit yes but you can see that um it's actually just going to do it to this one as opposed to over here now uh one thing that could be an issue is that it's not updating maybe it's broken maybe it's just not working but you can see that what actually happens is that if I uh if I go in you can see that it's there right as is right when I open up its context but the thing is is that um the changes won't propagate unless I actually open it up and make a change inside of these packed actors right so that's why that ended up changing but uh you can see that this is actually a really cool way of working um because if even if I do edit this say I've finished editing this building right and it's good as is and I'm never going to open it again then it's fine uh I just you know like you know you never really want to take that for granted and make a potential slip up right so just be careful of that but um let's move on to the the third one which is uh really cool so uh the third tool which we're actually going to use in tandem with this is actually going to be this thing called the placement tool now uh this is still sort of like one that I'm still kind of figuring out so I'm only going to go over the surface of it just just a bit but uh you'll be able to see the application a bit so uh it's another plugin that you're going to need to find and it's called the placement uh asset placement editor uh mode right and you can see right here is that it enables quick placement of Assets in a world as full actors or various types of lightweight objects right and this is really cool because um when we activate it we're going to be able to take these houses and we're actually going to be able to basically scatter them because the cool thing about the actor placement is it's actor right it's not just static meshes it's not just foliage it's any type of actor it could be sound cues it could be skeletal meshes could be animations could be all those type of things we can actually place them through the tool but where is it found well it's actually a mode right so if we go to the mode and we go into placement now it's going to give us sort of something similar to our um you know our landscape mode but in this case uh we're going to have our single options here where um we can actually just select a like say in this case one of our level actors and you can see that it's being added to the pallet and we can select multiple ones too right and uh so say we could use this very easily with collections but in this case what I'm going to do is I'm actually just going to select our demo house that we just created right here and you can see it's in our pallet and what I'm going to do is I I'm just for this one I'm going to hit single right and let's look at the the options here so you can see that we have our things aligned to normal as well as like uh random rotations uh along the you know the Z uh the X and the Y as well as you know scaling pretty pretty standard and um as well as like options for a relative offset where we can make it go into the ground or even like uh World location offsets so you can also choose obviously like where you'll be placing things in this case I'm placing it on a static mesh right and you can see because I have single mode on that it's already showing me where the house is and uh say if I've added more to this let me just add a couple more right I I have to actually select the tool it's a little weird it's uh in this case what it's going to do is it's going to cycle through everything right until um you know it will go with that so in this case you kind of have to have one asset selected right uh in order for it to kind of do its thing properly right and you can see here that I have the random size on so it's it's giving us random sizes um but we can actually go ahead and you know we can actually turn off um you know the mirror asset browser and we can actually go ahead and we can actually drag things into here and through this you know um it will or it should at times it's a little buggy but it will um sort of cycle through what's in our our pallet here so what I'm just going to do is I'm just going to make sure I have the one selected um and yeah you can see here I can just place them side by side if I wanted to right obviously scale is wrong so let's go ahead and let's just make sure that this is one to one um and it also has some random you know rotation on it but you can see that I can place these houses pretty fast uh but the main one is going to be the paint tool now this one is a little intense like um I just like placed let's see here uh two Assets in the same zone so really be careful uh I found that um um you kind of have to have like a really low value in order for it to kind of place properly so in this case I have 01 and even then that's a a little intense so let's go 01 and I'm just going to go ahead and I'm just going to paint these houses right so imagine this was like a hill right and let me just yeah like so I have to actually select these in the world because um uh that's how this tool particularly works with actors um at least blueprint actors where because it's essentially a level but you can see that I was able to you know add a bunch but now let's say this is a um maybe some grass or something like a plant Let's uh let's actually see here um let's just filter and look a couple oh some broken textures there I'll have to fix those but uh let's go ahead and let's say grab this white Everlasting here now uh what I'm going to do is I can totally paint you know with uh with this tool right but you may have noticed that if you go out of uh the browser it's going to show up as none instance 66 it's not even going to show up in our content browser or sorry our outliner and that's because uh in order to actually get rid of them you need the you know actually be in the placement tool and you need to actually have um you know the the actor in here like say if I uh let's actually test that just so I'm not saying the wrong things let's actually highlight one that's not there and yeah like what's happening is that it will only select what you currently have selected in the asset the sorry the content browser but it allows you to pretty much quickly Place meshes uh as is as you see right so you no longer have to really use the um you know the foliage tool if you didn't want to right and like I'm not saying you should you should definitely use it but it it just at least makes it really quick in order to be able to place this type of stuff um and of course uh I believe let's see here oh yeah you can place deal too which is pretty cool right so if you wanted to place like maybe you have um maybe not any leaks but maybe you have some blood splatters or something um or say in this case I have Ash right so maybe I want to put Ash on the ground I could totally do that right and because it's surface aligned right it allows me to quickly place them along uh you know the surface pretty pretty cool right so um yeah that's one thing let me see if I actually have skeletal meshes I do which is great so let's actually go into here and let's we can actually add say a mannequin to the scene right and you can see that it just added a crap ton of mannequins um and you can see it also added it to the level so um it allows us to like Place quite a bit right involved so you can see how easy that this is you know for um for placing things um but I am going to have to you know go and find my um my plant that I had here which was the uh is it Everlasting yeah one of these and I'm just just going to just delete these because I mean I prefer not having them this way right um it's a little it requires a lot of management and know which asset you put down so just be careful of that but let's go ahead and let's um let's see if we can actually like say make a little something out of a couple of these assets really quick so we uh using this tool or the tool tools that we just went over uh let's go ahead and let's let's add the house right so we have a house now uh and I'm also just going to say add in a little bit of a platform that it's on right uh maybe it's like a little bit in the ground maybe it's not right so we have the house and it's on a little bit of a platform um and then uh this is also something that I made with the tools that we just went over uh where I used a bunch of like planks to make it and I'm just going to add a couple couple rods that I put together right and maybe on the side here all right like that and we can also you know uh maybe we can add a couple sticks or whatever in behind it for whatever reason right just just like that and let's go ahead and actually use the um the place actors tool the placement tool to add a couple of these fishing sticks a little randomly around this area so let's just do that let's see how this works uh let's actually go 0.1 right so we got a couple sticks around here looks kind of cool h right just like that and you know um there is like I'm seeing a little bit of a thing going on going right over there but that's no problem but um yeah so we added some sticks and let's also add in uh some of those flowers that we were looking at and let's go ahead let's add those common everlastings like into the cracks you know just for the sake of it just while we're here you know we'll just add a couple of these right here a couple right here right and yeah let's also just do a little bit of a paint on it too just make this kind of small yeah it's not going to be small um but yeah you can see just like with that we were able to place a couple things and and that's actually how I've been building it but um yeah uh that kind of like covers everything and I hope it helped um and it's going to be able to help you guys in the future with uh with your own worlds and just being able to make more high quality assets um but yeah it's been very fun making this tutorial um I hope you guys liked it and please subscribe if you enjoyed it uh I am hoping to upload more frequently uh I got sick a bit so that's why I kind of fell off but um yeah uh that's it I hope you liked it and have a good night take care

Channel: Daniel Langhjelm

Views: 40,816

Keywords: Unreal, Unreal Engine, World Building, ue5, 5.2

Id: TqJLKr1hyvc

Length: 30min 16sec (1816 seconds)

Published: Sun May 14 2023