Starting Off with rdInst

Last Edited: 6th October 2024
Tutorial created using rdInst version 1.50

Congratulations on your purchase of rdInst!

rdInst provides tools and systems to get the best possible rendering and editing speeds from the Unreal Engine by using tightly optimized singleton instancing of Static Meshes.

These instances are also highly interactable – often without any extra processing costs. Changes to your instancing at runtime can be saved to tight alteration lists and applied when you load the game/project.

Following the Epic guidelines on project configurations combined with following some simple procedures with rdInst can help you achieve great frame-rates from fully populated levels.

You can take the instance optimization as far as you want. Even just enabling Auto-Instancing with rdInst can help greatly boost your performance.

One of the best things you can do to boost your game performance is to remove physics simulating actors and skeletal mesh actors from the equation when in the distance – but you don’t just want them to disappear – rdInst proxies provide a solid system where these types of actors are ISMs in the distance, seamlessly swapping to their real counterparts when close to the player or close to an impact.

Starting up the Unreal Editor after you’ve installed rdInst, you’ll notice a few things:

  1. Each Level will now contain a “rdInstSettings” actor from which you can control the various features of rdInst.
  2. The Epic Tool Menu now has a menu option for rdInst with an About Window for version checking.
  3. The Content Browser Context Menu now has a menu section for rdInst.
  4. The Level and Level Outliner have a rdInst submenu.

With the UI tools you’re able to config default behaviors for meshes – their instancing settings, setting a mesh to always be a pickup, down to setting an actor class to swap to when close to the mesh in the level.

There’s also a tool that can convert your selected actors into a tightly baked SpawnActor using instancing where possible and retaining physics/interaction for everything else – even those things can be converted to instances and have their interactable actors swap in automatically when close.

To learn more about the various aspects of rdInst you can go through some of the tutorials – each section is ordered in terms of complexity so starting at the top and working down at least the first one to two should help build a good knowledge of how to do things.

To find more specific information you can use the User Manual and the Reference Manual.