UE5: Building Structures - #10 Convert to Static Meshes (inc. NANITE)

In this series, we will look at all of the different ways of building structures in UE5, from manual modelling tools to automated scripts using splines, geometry scripts, PCG and other techniques.

In this episode, we'll look at when and how you should convert your spline structures into static meshes. Also, we will explore how to group your meshes for performance and ease of editing.

You can catch up so far by following the playlist

00:00 - Intro
00:22 - Avoid Premature Optimisation
00:47 - A Quick Profiling Example
03:02 - How NOT to Convert Spline Meshes
04:24 - How TO Convert Spline Meshes
09:58 - Convert to NANITE
12:01 - Sluggish Movement when Lots of Spline Actors
13:32 - Basic Grouping
17:13 - Instanced Static Meshes
22:34 - Packed Level Actors
29:41 - Final Playtest
30:05 - An Issue with Invisible Meshes
32:06 - Summary Thoughts

[malliaridis]

This video is filled with a lot of useful information. Thanks a lot for that.

[SeanForsythTutorials]

Absolutely stellar video, thank you so much for your time and sharing the knowledge.

[peacesells]

Thank you for doing this video, it's full of important info that you don't see everywhere!!

[sandscraper]

Great video! Really appreciate you going to the effort of testing all of the combine methods!

[istealpixel]

Thank you, more actual useful optimization tutorials are needed

[drumandbassob]

amazing tutorial really helping to cement what i have figured out on my own its helping me build out my large map, i hope you will show what to do with the floors/roofs as i haven't found a great way to do this yet, keep up they great work

[swarmagent]

Thank you for another great video! You will get a better perf approximation in full screen (F11). It may be a bug currently, but the draw and primitive stats seem to also report editor components.

[dsjdzyd]

very informative, thank you
You are good tutor :)

[krukhlis]

UE 5 Editor surprises every day! Thanks for this essential info. Just wondering if there is any Node that you can call from your PCG that will convert PCG to the static mesh?

[RomanTimm]

Hey thank you for the awesome video and showing GPU monitoring.
Question though about collisions. It seems that my walls have no collisions on them. How do I add them?

[emptybruh]

Does this work well with Lumen? And doesnt instancing like this prevent correct culling?

[AkanNota]

When I use Merge Actors, I can’t replace it with another object. Everything seems fine until the “Do you want to replace” warning, but after that, if I select a file named SM_Wall, my merged file is renamed to SM_SM_Wall. How can I fix this?

[semirukiya]

First of all - thank You for another great tutorial! I have a question tho.

Can I just leave the spline meshes on the scene for gameplay instead of merging them? I mean a situation where You have a river or road mesh. After merging it into one mesh, it's not too good for rendering because when You see but 1 pixel of it, it will render the whole road. So hence my question if it's totally safe to just leave splines in such situation. From my understanding as long as they don't need to be recalculated (they don't move, don't get edited by anything etc.) they should be fine, right?

Once again, a great series! Cheers!

[whaleD]

So what would be more efficient, using PCG or Blueprint for that wall generation?

[EfficioIgnisVitae]

Yo, how do we make that window mesh though? T.T

[chaosordeal]

Packed levels would not work well on terrain of unknown shape and size generated at runtime. A big set of buildings on a plane won't work in a hillside city.

[gallerykim]

What is the reason for using packed level actors instead of level instances?