I would like to introduce you to the Simple Instanced Spline Mesh plugin.
The plugin provides a simple, lightweight, and robust tool for building Hierarchical Instanced of Static Meshes using splines.
It was built with level design in mind, to make designers' life easier, and iterations faster.
It offers a variety of tools related to meshes placed using spline.
OVERVIEW VIDEO
I am happy to see what you've made with this. If you encounter any errors or crashes, feel free to contact me, I will do what I can to make it work as well as possible.
Technical Details
Features:
- Multiple meshes - you can set multiple different meshes that will automatically align on the spline. The meshes are aligned using their bounds, not the pivot, which means that if you have a mesh, that has some bad pivot, the tool will still align it in a smart way!
- First and Last meshes - you can set up special meshes at the beginning or end of the spline, which allows you to control exactly how your fences or walls begin or end.
- Mesh randomizing - with multiple meshes selected, you can make them appear randomly so that your fences, walls, or even towns are extremely simple to randomize to make them look more natural.
- Ground alignment - the tool allows aligning meshes to the ground using their bounds, which is much more accurate and good-looking than using pivot casting. Also, the ground alignment can be applied to each mesh individually.
- Asynchronous calculations - calculations are by default performed on a separate thread, which allows creating very, very long splines with thousands of meshes without freezing your computer, which improves the level design speed and makes it more comfortable.
Code Modules:
- SimpleInstancedSplineMesh
Number of Blueprints: 1
Number of C++ Classes: 6
Network Replicated: No
Supported Development Platforms: Windows 64
Supported Target Build Platforms: Windows 64
Documentation: DOCUMENTATION
Important/Additional Notes: Currently ground alignment work for Landscape only, but it's a work in progress, and we are planning on adding support alignment to other surfaces too.