Unreal Engine 5 Tutorial - Instanced Static Meshes - ISM/HISM [1/4] 

Extremely helpful. Thank you for the detailed explanation!

Interesting thought. The milisecond cost of the instanced meshes is more than the actual ones. I've been told to always count the miliseconds, as it's more solid way of measuring performance

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Instanced Meshes are really helpful at making a small map I think

That's gold information, thank u so much

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Great explanation !!

Great tut! Thanks

With the introduction of creative 2.0 in fortnite, this is super useful for me to get started on some maps that i can show my friends

Thanks, man! Great explanations.

grate tutorial, thanks for sharing

Perfect!. Thanks

Are instances of a mesh shared among all actors that are instancing the same asset? Or are they only instanced within the same actor? edit: Someone told me it is only instanced within the ISM component, which I figured, just wanted to be sure.

Is this still relevant for Nanite meshes? I've read that Nanite collapses all Nanite meshes into a single draw call. And I believe UE now implements dynamic mesh instancing too, to accomplish the same thing with non-Nanite meshes? But I'm sure there are all sorts of "well actually..."s in there.

How to convert ISM to a normal mesh? I need them to be destructible

great video!why can't you simply lay down the bricks in the scene as separate meshes and than merge them later with merge actors or Packed Level Blueprints?would it still produce ISMs?what are the differences?

Would hierarchical instanced static mesh make sense for a grass mesh? Or is Unreal's built in foliage system a better option? Or would the combination of the two make more sense?

Hey, i make a house with multiple static mesh, and i have 100 average draw calls. But when i make an instance of this static mesh, i have 300 average draw calls ... So i don't understand ..

Interesting! Thank you for sharing. But i have a few thoguhts or questions.. If I dragged the same object from the content drawer into the scene or duplicated something (by using the duplicate function), wouldnt that be an instance too? Would that be more like that hierarchical instanced mesh then (since it has the ability to calculate LOD)? And also; if I use Instanced Static Meshes like you do in this video (e.g. for creating a Building made of modular pieces) and I also have Nanite active for each static mesh (which in my understanding kind of makes LODs redundant) would it be similiar/better then using hierarchical instanced static meshes? What are your thoughts

Hey, nice Video-Playlist. Thank you. Do you have something about physics on instanced static meshes? My Chairs aren't affected of physics and all static now (like in instanced STATIC meshes)

Thank you for the video. Very helpful. Question: If you have a bunch of instances of say, a tree, and you want to change that tree out throughout the entire project. How would you go about editing the instances that are already there?

That is fine. I am trying to construct scene with many spheres mimicking gravitation. Doing this way, there is no option to enable gravity or simulate physics (and I need to add tag "Active"). How to do that instead using this method?

genius

And how do you fix the texture tiling on instant meshes? Same as a classic mesh?

Interesting how do instanciated static meshes hold up in a nanite scene. So coming from 7:33 using hierachical instanced static meshes would be preferable, because Nanite needs access to each individual instance, right?

I thought 4.22 converts static meshes to instances automatically? What is the reason of doing that manually? Also, do both methods support CULLING PER Instance?

Where can I find the script for this?

What happens if the instanced mesh is a wall for example, but different actors use it. Does Unreal recognize its the same instanced mesh across all actors?

Uff. HISM,ISM,SM,Actor,LightActor,Auto-Instancing and all +/- Nanite - Unreal has a lot of possibilities, but which are the best or for which case?

I wonder if this will work for open world buildings.

Hello! Great lesson! Is it possible to make each mesh instance have a random material?

when you duplicate a brick for example in UE, does the mesh data get duplicated too in memory? I thought the mesh data would stay at the same place in memory and two instances would be pointing to the same mesh data. But here you seem to imply that its not the case, ie duplicating n times an object with mesh data = m bytes would result in a memory footprint of n * m bytes ? Edit: maybe i misunderstood, memory footprint is unchanged with ISM but draw calls are shorter?

Note to self: watched this

Very Helpful but what's the difference between packed level actor and the Merge Tools>ISM/HISM? Don't they all create Instanced static mesh? Which method is better for performance? I'm confused T_T

Greetings, super good tutorial. Is it possible to have more than one static mesh in the same Construction Script? Target for add instance only takes one? Im trying tho different ways. Thanks

I have a question, if i use multiple type of assets to build something, what is the best option, create an instances or merging them into a new assets?

Very nice explanation. When you don't use Nanite,Lumen, or VSM, and say have around 50-90 duplicates ( a fairly low poly modular tileset ) would you still benefit from setting up this system? Thank you.

Actually if im building a castle like you did in your example. It would be 1) better to model it out and manipulate the geometry to have some randomness and have some different looking parts 2) better for textures because you can crap on a 512x512 texture on a mesh with high polycount, but lets say a 2K Normalmap. Which leads to same visual fidelity, but MUCH less VRAM usage. 3) It would not hit Performance at all, maybe if you do that 5000x times in a scene. I know its a cheap way to get performance. But with being locked to the same block every time, we are restricting fidelity by a lot. I guess this is only good for Mobile games. Also texturing is not possible anymore. Decal layers etc. inside the main material which are the sole reason stuff even looks good and not generic. Because if you would texture this, you would not be able to paint across the "tiles" because theres only one texture which is the main mat of the Parent block.

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i'm struggling with trees and grass and my map size is 4*4 km forest. I used Static foliage but the performance is not satisfied. What do you recommend HISM or ???

If I don't care about lods because of Nanite can I just use Instance Static Meshes on larger areas?

makes it sense to use it with nanite?

Will it work for 3ds max?

Is hierarchal needed when using nanite on a mesh? Or does nanite not support ISM

hey i have a question..can u vertex paint instanced static mesh?

does ths support nanite? im n ot gona do it like this, the bits are 2 small , and i think its overkill, to go this small :) but it intresting thank you. in 5.2 does it work the same or it bit diffrent?

is it possible to actually revert this ? i mean i have ISM blueprint but i want all single mesh to be spawned in scene on their own ? so for example if i have one blueprint with 100 elements, how i can make them to appear in scene as 100 objects (in positions/rotations/scale from blueprint) ?

What about nanite? I heard that there wouldnt be additional draw calls with nanite... regaurdless of instance static mesh or normal static mesh.

what if i for example have a city already done by small pieces (static meshes), in ue5, and i want to not build it again in blender or somewhere else, but i want to let unreal know hey this is repeated over thousands of times, make it an instanced mesh, or something alike, is that possible? even if its a longer way?

Why use the instanced meshes, while i can just make all my meshes through nanite. What's the deal ?