rdInst Tutorial 6.8 – Baking Spawn Data from Procedural Volumes
Last Updated: 27th April 2025
Tutorial Created using rdInst version 1.50
Tutorial using UE5.3 or above
Sometimes creating your procedural volumes can take quite a number of frames, and cause stuttering when dynamically loading them in.
The rdSpawnActor can be used in situations like this – it’s blindingly fast at spawning – even spawning tens of thousands of instances doesn’t make it blink.
This tutorial shows how you can use rdInst to convert Actors in the level and instances in Procedural Volumes such as PCG (and Foliage Volumes) into rdSpawnActors with baked spawn data.
Step 1. Create a level
Create a new Level based on the Open World Template
Step 2. Create a new PCG volume
Now we create a simple PCG volume with a few trees.
The first thing to do is make sure that the PCG plugin in enabled, if not – enable it:
Then right-click in the Content Browser and select New “PCG Graph”
Open that up, and now add the code as below:
Add some variation in the Transform Points node, and add 3 meshes in the Static Mesh Spawner, point to our tree meshes.
Now drag the new PCG Graph into the level to create a PCG Volume;
Step 3. Bake the PCG volume into a rdSpawnActor
This next bit uses rdInst to harvest the PCG instances into a new rdSpawnActor – everything is baked into the actor ready for spawning.
Select the PCG volume in the level and right-click – then select the “rdInst->Create rdSpawnActor from selection”
