Hi there,
when I select a actor in the scene outliner and convert them to a Blueprint, all his child actors are lost (unlike creating a prefab in Unity for example)
Reproduction:
- Place static mesh in scene
- Attach another static mesh to it as child
- Adjust (relative) scale and (relative) position
- Select parent actor and click on “Blueprint/Add Script” (why not simply “Convert to Blueprint”?)
- Actor is replaced by new blueprint instance, but all child actors are now detached
Expected behavior:
- Child actors are converted into components
- Relative position and scale are preserved
Hello ,
I believe this is working as intended. If you read the tool tip for this button you will see that it says “Convert this actor into a reusable blueprint”. The key word here is “this”, meaning only the single actor that is selected. However, you can accomplish the same goal by add things to the scene as components to an actor. There is an “Add component” button that is available. You could then convert the actor that you have added components to, to a blueprint and achieve the same result. I hope that this information helps.
Make it a great day
Many thanks for the trick with the blueprint wrapper for the child actors. But why is this even necessary if parent blueprint could simply add them as components directly (in theory)? Now I have to create many single-use-pseudo-blueprints just to convert a structure of actors in a blueprint.
Maybe it would be possible to show a dialog like ‘Convert child actors to components YES/NO’ or something?
There is another similar issue with that as well: 4.7.3: Convert child actors to components? - Programming & Scripting - Epic Developer Community Forums
I got the feeling that the strict differentiation between child actor and components feels very unintuitive to most devs (I am sure there are very good technical reasons for that, don’t get me wrong).
Hello ,
After I did a bit more digging I found a way to do what you originally wanted to do that may be viable. You can use the blueprints dropdown at the top of the editor to convert a group of selected actors into a blueprint. Please note that if they are parented under another actor this could cause issues with scale and/or positioning. I hope that this helps.
Make it a great day
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MANY THANKS!! Tried it, and it really works. 
Just had to detach all child components, select them all and then create a blueprint with the menu option like shown in your screenshot (it’s not present in the right mouse button menu).
Unfortunately that’s not possible if the parent actor is already a blueprint. In this case it’s ignored when creating the new blueprint.
However, many thanks for this trick, it will make thinks more easy to me in the future!
Despite that, I still think it should be possible to convert instanced actors from the scene into components of a blueprint, simply by dragging them from the scene outliner into the components tab).
