rdBPtools Tutorial 5.1 – Introduction to SIDs
Last Updated: 10th December 2024
Tutorial created using rdBPtools version 1.40
Sids are a way of describing a Static Mesh along with some its rendering settings such as Material Overrides, Reverse Culling, Culling Distances, Spawn Type, Collision and a Unique ID.
They’re stored as Names (FNames) so have a maximum length of 1024 characters. The soft-reference paths are compressed to save character lengths.
There are various ways of building sids – from existing StaticMeshes, StaticMeshComponents, rdInstance classes and building them manually.
Both rdBPtools and rdInst build their reference tables from sids now – they’re even slightly faster than the previous system and require very little memory and setup overhead.
Another benefit to sids is that they’re in essence – soft pointers, so no resources are loaded until the asset is used in the prefab, no objects that are hidden are loaded until shown.
From within rdPrefabs you have the following nodes available to work with sids:
To work with either the stored prefab item data or the Instance Component directly you can find the specific data by using the sid as the key (To access instListX and ismcListX you’ll need to untick “context sensitive” as they’re hidden):
