Section 4. Randomization

rdBPtools has some powerful Randomization features. You can assign each and every actor it’s own set of randomization, they can have randomized Location,Rotation,Flip,Scale and Visibility – all offset from the assets original location/transform. They can also be reliant on the visibility of other actors in the Blueprint.

Unlike most randomization systems, this system is based around variance of an actor from it’s placed position/rotation etc. This makes it easy to set up your scene ready to convert to a prefab with items in generic places – then define the “variance” parameters to allow each instance of your prefab to have realistic variance.

Setting up Randomization is easy, and is applied to actors straight in the level – these settings will stick whether or not you have rdBPtools installed – and are customized for the “instance” of your asset.

The actual Random Stream is shared by all actors hierarchies so setting a RandomSeed sets all actors in all Blueprints and Sub-Blueprints.

Most of the settings in the Randomization window are straight-forward.

When you have multiple actors selected and their values differ, those values are set as “indeterminate” and will not be saved across actors unless you specify a value.

The Location ,Rotation and Scale are Ranges – the Transform will only vary between the sets of limits you specify here.

The Flip probability is for each axis, 0.0 means never, 1.0 means always.

The Show probability works the same way.

You can enter any amount of Theme names, separated by commas, the object will only be visible when the theme box is empty, or current theme is one of the specified names.

The Rely On Actor option allows you to choose another actor that the current one/s require to be visible. You can select an actor from the drop-down box, or use the sampler to select one from the level.

If you have a lot of actors that rely on other chains of actors, you can select them in the level, starting with the last one and working forward to the first one, then with them selected, choose “Set Rely On Actors” from the rdBPtools submenu in the Context Menu.