UE4 Optimization: Instancing 

Tips: -If the instances are invisible in game, go to the material editor and enable *Used With Instanced Static Meshes* - Use instances only for objects close to each other, because the whole group is either rendered or hidden (culled) at once - no granularity here. - Several instancing components per actor are OK, and can help with the issue from the previous point. -You can't vertex paint individual instances - though you can paint the mesh and save, if identical copies are not a problem for you.

Super helpful! Thanks.

Wielkie dzięki za ten kanał, od lat uczę się modelowania, ale wraz z własnym rozwojem, zacząłem bawić się shaderami i wciąga mnie to coraz bardziej. W pracy trafiłem na problem związany z sortowaniem przezroczystości, potem trafiłem na film z ditheringiem. Później szukałem czegoś o shaderach na YT i trafiłem na Twój material płonącego drewna, zacząłem więcej o Tobie szukać i okazało się, że prowadzisz cały kanał na ten temat, na którym ponownie znalazłem wspomniany wczesniej dithering. Super jest to co robisz i doceniam! Ta cała wiedza z różnych dziedzin miksuje się w jednym miejscu, bardzo mnie to fascynuje. To jest chyba to, czym chciałbym się zajmować, ale obawiam się, że może już być trochę za późno z nadgonieniem wielu rzeczy. Chociaż - kto wie... Ledwo po studiach trafiłem do pierwszej poważnej pracy i ze stanowiska 3d przeniesiono mnie do robienia efektów i każdy kolejny kawałek wiedzy, każdy kolejny efekt, który uda mi sie osiągnąć jest jak diament... Zdaję sobie sprawę, że historia życia jakiegoś randoma spośród komentarzy jest nic nie warta, ale miałem jakąś wewnętrzną potrzebę się tym podzielić. Tym bardziej, że ludzi z taką wiedzą i to we własnym kraju jakoś ciężko mi znaleźć : ) Pozdrowienia!

This was a super-useful tutorial, and very well-explained! Thank you very much for sharing.

Thank you so much for doing these tutorials. They're very easy to follow and are structured so well. Can't praise your work enough. Looking forward to the next tutorial!

keep up the good work, there aren't a lot of TA help on youtube, so this channel is absolutely a goldmine. THANKS!

jump to 6:45 for how to create instances in Unreal Engine

Yay, finally! Very informative, thank you very much. :) Btw. if you didn't know: you can right-click a pin (like tranform and location) and "split struct pin" instead of the "make transform" nodes. Just makes your BPs a little bit more compact. You can also right-click and "promote to variable", to skip some steps, when you want to use new variables :)

Thank you for this. This really helped me with creating city layouts!!! Thank you and Merry Christmas!!

Absolutely terrific video! Thank you so much for this!

Thankyou so much! This will greatly improve the framerate of my game!

wow your tutorials are some high quality well explained stuff i saw on youtube, and trust me i browse daily for tutorials. Jeez this is amazing.

This was awesome!! thanks so much. Now I can change my game settings and tackle the performance issues I've been seeing!🤩

Great! Thank you! It's a brilliant tut!

Great Video, Very Informative, Thank you.

Thank you very much for this ! Keep going !

Excellent tutorial! Thank you so much, this was the info I needed.

Thank you! Very helpful video, bookmarked! :)

Life saver! Outstanding tutorial!!

Amazing stuff! Thanks so much!

Very Helpful. Thank you!

Fantastic video! Very informative

This was really helpful, Thanks!

super helpful while debugging my current framerate and even though my game's for mobile, it showed me some tools i can work with, thanks :) just have to figure out the numbers I should achieve for having more mobiles being able to play my first map :)

Huge help, thank you so much!

Great explanation. Thank you!

Thanks dude really useful!

Really interesting tutorial thanks

thanks that was insightful!

Amazing video, this was extremely helpful!

Great explanation man! You have helped me out more than you could possibly know!

Well done! Just want to clarify one section: using instancing doesn't require using blueprints. You can also do it from code. Thanks for the tutorial!

Great video ! Thanks you

Great tutorial!

finding your chanal was like finding gold! realy amazing stuff! Thank you a lot, can't wait for your next topic :) !

over 9000! cheers. compile 🔥

great video !!

Great video!

fajny filmik dzięki! :P

Thank you fantastic job. I downloaded your assets from Cubebrush to study them.

Very good video. Please make more!

Very usefull video, thank you!

Thank you very much! You save my life

many thanks! :)

I owe you a beer or two for your amazing resources. Muchos gracias!

superb tut

amazing tutorials in your channel, thanks a lot keep like this :)

Thank you :)!

Thanks you very mush.

I think I've said this before. But you are amazing!

thank you my friend,its useful

This will be perfect for my mountain cliffs thank you :-)

very good teacher

Teşekkürler.

5:28 gave me an idea, say we have a town ur walking to a specific building and you didnt group any meshes outside. However in the building you group meshes together because theres no point in culling as oppose to outside you cant call because everything is popping in and out. Obviously using level streaming when going towards/inside the building.

That 30 min tutorial took a lot of time from you to make it , thanks a lot mate for your time , btw are you enginer in some big games company :) ? you have great info .

very nicee

Супер урок!!!!

inspiring

Awesom Tutorial @Tech Art Aid. I have one question. How can I use Baked Lighting on this?

In your example the BP of instance mesh if you move it in a circle path does the collision of each instance will move with the object ? hope you got what i mean .

Question: is this only really useful if you need to have tons of a certain mesh in a scene at once? I'm using a ton of building meshes for a city, but they're randomly generated and the player typically can't see more than 15 at a time if they try. Would instancing help with this at all?

me first minute in the video : "WHAT SORCERY IS THIS!!!" nice video man thx and keep the good work

it's a great technique but what about the visibility\frustrum\etc culling, is it faster to cull(hide edraw) individual sm actors(f.e. when we merge actors into a single mesh instead of constructing HISM) or instances in the HISM actor? f.e. if you have some actors in front and behind the mountain, would it be better to make 2 hism actors, or one for all of the meshes. And in what cases would it be better to simply merge them into 2 meshs? Thx

Oh god, this is sooo good! I have a question: You said the foliage tool use basically Hierarchical Instanced Static Mesh metod. If so, i will not get any perfomance improvement when spam al lot of tree, or grass with Hierarchical Instanced Static Mesh, right?

will this work for me I have very large 16 tile height map with lots of trees and rocks mountains etc

"One thing to know about instanced static meshes is that if any part of the mesh is rendered, the whole of the collection is rendered. [...] It’s recommended to keep a single set of instanced meshes in a smaller area; for example, a pile of stone [...], a stack of boxes" software.intel.com/en-us/articles/unreal-engine-4-optimization-tutorial-part-2#instanced-static-meshes

HI since i am new to unreal engine ... is this useful for arch viz scenes ?

Awesome video! Is it possible to instance skeletal meshes?

Nice tutorial ..... this is for static meshes .... Does this have a similar technique for skeletal meshes ? I mean : is it possible to get hundreds of skeletal meshes working together (like in the total war games) or as a wandering crowd ?

How can I make the ring shape?? I made 1 myself that has a rectangular shape... I'm sorry I didn't watch the video as the internet is too slow and the vids bot loading..

Hi, Thanks a lot, super helpful video, but I would like to ask for a clarification, I am searching like crazy how to bake lightmaps for instanced meshes but I didn't find it. So, it makes me thing that dynamically lighted instances are less expensive then if they are baked and less expensive yet then "pure" (not instanced) static meshes. Am I right ? P.S.: I am a beginner in Unreal Engine 😉

Great video but still have questions: 1. What's the difference between regular Instances and Hierarchical Instances? 2. How can you reference any of the instances in case you need to destroy one, etc? Thanks

hi, thanks for video you said that we can update the transform of a single instance, but then we will lose all the performance. But we lose all the performance if we update all the instances individually right? With a for loop for example? In case we want to update only a single one, we lose only a respective fraction of the performance, right?

you save me from the hell fps drop i tried and it gives me 120fps with 1000 of instances thanks thanks

hey i know this is 5 years ago, but i am wondering, i have a utility widget that i want to spawn in a bunch of tiles, however when i close the program those tiles don't save. is their a way to keep them saved in data ?

Great topic! I have tried Instancing many times before but every time failed somehow Now I'm going to play with the power of instances ps. how working particles with meshes compared to this Instancing method?

for me its too many arcade static meshes does merging them can help like instanced static meshes???

can you make a link to a 4.14 project? so i can use it for my project? i tried making a diferent version where i used instanced static mesh instead of hiearchial instance static mesh but for some reason lod wont work with the instanced static mesh...do you why or how to fix it? thanks you are awesome

Hi can I destroy or hide the one of these rock during the collision with others. And is collision detection affects the efficient of this idea?

Could you still individually vertex paint these instance meshes? I.e. it will cost an extra draw call on for example moss over rocks, but not a draw call per individually painted instanced rock.

great video, i just wanna ask: Having a mesh with 157 triangles + lod Using Hierarchical instanced static mesh Why the instances don't have an independent lod, but they all depends from the first instance ?

hey i have a question..can u vertex paint instanced statiic meshes?

Where can I enable automatic display of how much I moved component/actor? Is this some recently added feature? I'm still on 4.13.1 tho..

Quick question. If I need two groups of instances lets say I have several groups of rocks I want to instance. Is it o.k. to create more than one group of instances in one BP? I notice it doesn't update in viewer when transforming instances so I need to combine all of them in one BP so I can see how they line up :-)

Your Experimental Code does not seem to work in 4.23 killing frames yes but doesn't move anything. Any thoughts? This is in regards to the Update Instance Transform.

Is there a way I could detect collision with a mesh and get the id I'm colliding with?

This is amazing, great work! I downloaded your demo and then for testing changed the "Instance Mesh" in one of the blue prints to a basic block and then the frame rate went from 120fps to 12fps. It would see that the simple box would take up less CPU/GPU than the complex asteroid. Why do you think this happened?

Im making a Minecarft style block building game, would instancing meshes be the right method for me to use or is there a even better way? Im going to have several different meshes, first off regular blocks that are identical geometry wise, but that have a different material but also other meshes with different geometry. Amazing video btw! Its hard finding good videos on game optimization for UE4

Hi, if I create instances of a static mesh will that include the materials attached too? I mean will it create separate materials or an instance of the main material. Thanks.

I'm abit confused, i switched out the default static mesh, to use my own but it appears invisible even though i have instanced static mesh enabled..

Hello, I'm facing a weird issue in 4.19 where a large no. Of hism changes lod simultaneously like if i have 20 hism then 10 hism change lod and then other 10, and it is completely random they are not changing lods 1 by 1 based on screen space. Can u help ?

If you were to add 2 actors in your level and their mesh and materials are the same, will they automatically instance?

Why does my mesh not show the "Instancing" option? It goes from Static Mesh, to Materials, then to "Instanced Static Mesh Component" But there's no "Instances" section???

0 to 50 is 51, not 50 (I assume Last Index means the last index to call function with - for(i = first_index; i

AFAIK later Unreal versions added Auto Instancing (in 4.23?). Would you say this manual approach is now less relevant and only for extreme/edge cases? Or is the Auto Instancing actually not that useful?

are there anyways of making it fade into one another rather than instant snapping?

ok... what hardware you have? i think that the tesselation stage is doing a great job too.

Why is it unwise to set the meshes to static? Is it because the lightmap will be large? I was using this method to create a distant city with meshes of very low resolution lightmaps (

why do the instances LOD dont work on my project? They all come at the same color when i go into the LOD visualization