rdInst Manual version 1.35

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
  • 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.

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 5.3 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.


This user manual is broken into the following sections:

For detailed information on each of the Nodes and C++ functions, you can read up on them in the rdInst Reference Manual.