Level Instancing - Unreal Engine 5 Tutorial

hey guys today I'm going to show you what level instances are the two types of level instances and why you should actually use them so without further Ado let's get right into the video I have prepared a few assets here that we are going to be turning into level instances and how do you make a level instance is actually pretty simple so you just pick and select all the little assets you want to create as an instance and then what you do is basically go to go down here go to a level and then create level instance and here we have a popup show up and this is basically going to ask you about the pivot type and pivot Center Min Z and pivot world origin and um actor are very different Center Min Z basically will take the center and the minimum Z point of your group of meshes and it will make the pivot there for the world origin It basically well well takes the world origin as the pivot Center which is very bad uh it's it's going to create some problems definitely and then you have Center which basically just takes the center of all the assets you have and we have actor actor is a special one and it's not really that good because you need to have a specific actor that's going to be an actual um an actual pivot point so here I'm going to select Center Min Z and I'm going to hit okay and here it's going to pop up and tell me to save it and I'm going to save it as Li I so level instance underscore and I'm going to say rates or something like that doesn't really matter and now we have a simple level instance with this level instance you can grab it rotate it you can copy it which is basically the main purpose of it and it is very very simple indeed a very nice way to just uh spam assets across your scene or whatever you're creating now you can edit it but as you can see we don't really have anything to edit here we cannot click on these assets individually or do anything really so how you can do this is by clicking on the edit button here or by right clicking and then going into level and then selecting edit and in here you have a little bit of control with all these assets so basically what you can do let's just take this and we're going to bring it down and we're going to do like get it on this crate uh so what this does is when we hit Escape or exit here uh it will ask you to save the changes and when you hit save it will change all the level instances which it might be something you want to do it might be something you don't want to do but it is what it actually does so you can you change all the instances by changing only one which can be a bit impractical but at times it can be also very useful another thing that is a bit inconvenient about this is you have this level instance and when you have a lot of them you don't really know which is which so by dragging them out you have to figure out and it's not really it's not really easy to figure out which is which and what you need and the next one kind of solves that problem very well the next type of level instance uh another thing you can do before we move on is when you copy this and let's say you like the positioning of something here but you want to change uh the instances a bit so it doesn't feel repetitive what you can do is right click on it again and then go to level again and then break and break level instances this will break the level instance inside of the scene so you have separate instance meshes and you can change their uh change their positions whatever you really like you can delete them even if you want to and they're not in any way now connected to the level instance so it's a very good way to uh get assets around and then when breaking them you can just introduce that variation by maybe deleting some assets and then just rotating a few and it's very nice way to create a lot of variation uh another thing that's worth noting is you can actually go inside of these and if I go into unlit mode you can see the level instances and if I change anything in here so let's say um I'm going to move this one on top uh if I change anything it here it will be the same as changing it inside of a level so when I pull the level back you can see the instance has been edited here so it has this little BT on top instead of sitting on this crate right here the next type of level instance we're going to be creating is a packed level actor and it the process basically goes the same so you just select these right click and then go to level and then create back level actor instead of create level instance so click there it's going to ask again the same Pivot Point type I'm going to still keep Center Min Z and I'm going to hit okay so it asks you to save uh the level now and this is I'm going to call it level instance underscore and then cart and I'm going to click save and now it asks you something else it actually asks you to create a blueprint of this and it automatically gives the name which is pretty handy so I'm just going to hit save here and you'll immediately see the difference between uh this level instance and this one this one you can see what's happening because it's a blueprint you can see the icon of what it actually is and while you're dragging it along you can actually see the item you're dragging you still have the level instance you can drag out but you have the blueprint as well and good things about blueprints is that you can actually uh add some functionality to it so we'll be adding a little bit of functionality and I'll be showing you some of the limitations of that as well so let's hop into the blueprint and what we can do is go into construction script but before we do that just notice that we have instan static mhes here so this is one this is two this is three as you can see they're all instanced and they have their own names pretty good so let's go to construction script and you can see this Barrel let's say that's the mesch we want to change and add some functionality to it it's just going to be very simple so uh we're going to drag that out and we're going to say Set static mesh and now let's go to this uh we're going to make this promot a variable and I'm just going to call it mesh doesn't really matter much uh and we're going to say instance editable and that is basically it so now um since this is running this construction script you can check it inside the level immediately and you can see we lost the barrel so what we do is we actually just select the barrel here it's because the mesh is empty here so we just want to put Barrel in there for starters see now everything is completely fine so we will copy this over and now if you can see you have a mesh icon here so I can change this to a crate I can change this to another crate uh I can even change this to something like this or maybe something like this it does break because we don't have the material functionality but I uh personally wouldn't use this because of its limitations um if you're interested I could make this a bit more functional and show it in another video but this is off the scope for this one so the main point in not using these is that when you actually want to let's say you're you like this but you maybe want the crate to be a bit bigger and you decide oh let's just uh break it so break level instance same as before and when we break it it turns back into a barrel so that is one limitation that I have found personally and I really dislike I still use blueprint version of the level instance because it's much more uh easier to use you actually have um you actually have a little icon there and you know what's actually going on and if you expand this functionality it can be quite useful but I like it for like what it is it's just uh very handy to drag them out rotate maybe and then if I really want to change something I would just uh go to level again break break it yep and once you break it uh I would just let's say change this into this and there we go basically that's [Music] that [Music]

Channel: PopulusArt

Views: 13,065

Keywords: unreal engine, stylized, rocks, substance, designer, rock, cliff, material, sculpt, zbrush, painter, stone, stones, cliffs, ghibli, cartoon, how, to, make, station, stylizedstation, tutorial, course, series, mini, blender, brush, custom, guide, creation, part, one, part one, part 1, part I, part 21, part 2, part II, boulder, ue5, ue4, how to, IV, gojo, satoru, level, instance, design, packed, actor, instancing, ue, streaming

Id: ciYmhfmFqgo

Length: 9min 37sec (577 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 05 2024