rdBPtools Tutorial 1.1 – Getting Started

Last Updated: 2nd December 2024

Welcome to rdBPtools – a tools that gives you easy ways to build powerful prefabs and convert or harvest actors, foliage and PCG graphs.

If you purchased rdBPtools for the conversion features, feel free to skip the prefab section to here.

Prefabs

To start with, a Prefab is a Blueprint that contains any number of StaticMeshes, Interactive Blueprints, Lights, effects etc. When you hide, show or move the prefab around, all the objects in the prefab follow suit.

There are two types of prefab:

1. The ContainerBase prefab which on top of hosting all your objects, provides ways to:

  • Collate your objects into folders which can then be hidden or shown at any time
  • Randomize the transforms of your objects
  • Show on a random probability
  • Show on the reliance of another object being visible
  • Show objects and variations based on Themes

2. The RandomAsset prefab which randomly shows either a single object or a folder of objects from a collection.

You can easily create prefabs at any time by just selecting the actors in your level, right-clicking, and selecting the “Prefab->Create from Selection…” tool, see this tutorial for more.

One of the more powerful features is that you can nest prefabs within prefabs. Each prefab will use its parents randomization seed, so all randomization (unless overridden) will always be the same when supplied with a unique seed.

Themes are also derived from their parents, so you can add a series of themes to the parent prefab and all child prefabs will use those themes when selecting what to show.

To find more details and creating and editing Prefabs, go through the next two tutorial sections – they start with the basics and progress from there, so just go as far as you want or need in each section.

Conversions

rdBPtools provides many tools to convert actors and StaticMesh Instances to various formats.

  • Convert level actors, Foliage and PCG volumes to prefabs
  • Convert rdPrefabs to level actors
  • Convert other types of prefabs to level actors
  • Convert Assemblies to level actors
  • Convert Packed Level Actors to level actors
  • Convert Foliage to level actors
  • Convert PCG volumes to level actors
  • Convert level actors to Foliage
  • Convert level actors to Packed Level Actors (with instance harvesting)
  • Harvest Instances from any actor or volume

These tools are simply a “Select Actors in Level, Right-Click, Convert”.

You can find more about each specific type in the Conversion Tutorial Section.