rdInst Manual version 1.50
Last updated 2nd November 2024
Section 1. Introduction
Welcome to rdInst, a plugin that provides Handling of InstancedStaticMeshes, Spawned Actors and Niagara Effects, Proxies, Splines and soon Landscapes – both at runtime and in the editor.
The main features of this plugin are:
- Fast ISM and HISM instances, managed or unmanaged.
- Managed Spawning of Actors and Niagara systems, even from the Construction Script.
- Proxy Actors that swap in full actors from instances in the level when you get close (full state saving).
- A Spawning system that spawns Instances, Actors and Niagara systems (pooled and/or distributed over frames) – even spawn more Spawning actors to create very optimized and simple large scale worlds. Load-On-Demand.
- Fast integrated PickUp system with powerful Highlighting.
- Support for PCG with custom spawner nodes.
- Runtime Spline creation and manipulation.
- A lot of utility functions for Scalability, Construction optimization, Runtime instance to Proxy scan data conversion etc.
To use this plugin, just enable it (defaults to enabled) – all the tools will be available.
Note: If you’re here for the auto-instancing, all you need to do is select rdInstSettings from the outliner and tick the “Enable Auto-Instancing” box – that’s your reading for the day done.
Version 1.43 adds a couple of Editor Only features – the first is an about window (available in the Main Tools menu) and an Instance Settings window in the Content Browser Context menu.
If you’re using the runtime features of rdInst, the plugin will be needed for your packaged builds, but is small and quite portable.
The Manager uses UHierarchicalInstancedStaticMeshComponents (HISMCs) or UInstancedStaticMeshComponents (ISMCs) via a bool in rdInstBaseActor. You can set that and the type of instance removal (remove or recycle) with the rdSetUpInst() node or method.
The preferred type used to be (and up until 5.4 still is) HISMCs as they have a unique way of removing Instances which makes them faster to manage, without any apparent overhead. With Nanite though, the preferred is ISMs, and as of UE5.3, they also have the instance index “swapping” that HISMs have.
rdInst defaults to recycling instances rather than removing which allows you to know that the instance indexes will always be correct – it also provides a number of speed benefits.
This user manual is broken into the following sections:
- Section 2. The rdInst Actors – a breakdown of the actors and subsystem installed by rdInst
- Section 3. The rdActor – the main, managed Actor. Subclassing off this for your Blueprints gives a lot of benefits
- Section 4. The rdInstBaseActor and the rdInstSubsystem – call from anywhere, instance, spawn, and more
- Section 5. Actor and Component Pooling – breakdown of the various Pooling tools
- Section 6. Distributed Transactions – breakdown of the Distributed Transaction tools
- Section 7. rdProxies – breakdown of the various Proxy Types and how to use them
- Section 8. The rdSpawnActor – breakdown of the whole Spawn system, including spawn Baking
- Section 9. The rdProceduralActor – breakdown of the rdProceduralActor Procedural Population system
- Section 10. Spline Tools – breakdown of the Editor and Runtime Spline creation and manipulation tools
- Section 11. Landscape Paint and Deform Tools – breakdown of the Landscape Deformation and Painting tools
- Section 12. Useful Editor/Runtime Utility Nodes/Functions – description of the Runtime and Editor Based Utilities
- Section 13. PCG rdInst Spawner Nodes – description of the PCG custom spawner nodes
- Section 14. Version History
For detailed information on each of the Nodes and C++ functions, you can read up on them in the rdInst Reference Manual.
rdInst has two Editor only windows as well:
About Window:


Instance Settings Window:
