Week 31, Year 2: Grouping Actors in Unreal Engine.

It's a week too early for a post-project rant about Off the Map, the deadline is this Friday, so instead I thought I'd put together a few quick tips and tricks regarding the groups feature in Unreal Engine. Grouping actors is extremely useful for managing sets of items in a level and something I've been using a lot this week. In this example, I'll show you how I took 4 books to fill the shelves in a shop, using groups and copying for speed, and mirroring to hide repetition.

Quick side note: In some cases, an actor blueprint may be more appropriate. The advantage of using groups is it's quick and very, very simple.

To get started, I take a shelf that's been filled with books and group the books by hitting Ctrl+G. A green bounding box will appear to signify a locked group. The actors in the group now share a single transform and can be manipulated as one. Shift+G ungroups the actors.

Each set of shelves is filled with a group of books. At this point I'll start to notice things that might need tweaking a bit, usually because they're floating or clipping in to something. A quick way to fix this is to unlock the group with Right Click > Groups > Unlock, which will turn the bounding box red and allow you to move the actors individually.

A quicker way is to simply toggle group mode with Ctrl+Shift+G whenever you need to make adjustments.

Now that I have my groups, I hold Alt+Drag them along an axis to copy them to the next shelf over. To avoid having two identical groups next to one another, I re-arrange and mirror each set.

In order to mirror an actor in Unreal Engine, you need to bind the command to a key. For some reason it's unbound by default. Go to Editor Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts and search for Mirror. Bind the X, Y and Z mirror commands to any key you like, (I use Ctrl+Shift+X, Y and Z respectively) and you're good to go.

I repeat this process of copying, re-arranging and mirroring until all the shelves are filled. Once they're filled, I toggle groups off and start deleting books or replacing them with other assets to further break up the repetition.

So that's how I take 4 assets, whether they're books, drain pipes or houses and re-use them over and over again. Hopefully this helps a few people out and saves some time. Good luck for the hand in everyone!