[Feature Request] Instanced Spline Mesh Component

Hello Unreal Dudes and Dudettes,

I love the flexibility (ha, get it?) of the USplineMeshComponent and how it allows me to create roads and paths and the like. However, I do believe there’s one inherent flaw: the meshes aren’t instanced!! Though it seems that the most common use of a spline mesh component is in a repeating chain along a spline, the meshes used in rendering are not instanced (to my knowledge). For the current project I’m working on, I have to render A LOT of roads, and so I could really use a combination of InstancedStaticMesh and SplineMesh.

I took a look at the code for the USplineMeshComponent and discovered that all the fancy deformation is performed within the shader, which means, if I wanted to create my own InstancedSplineMesh class, I would have to journey down the rabbit hole of how to work with UE4 shaders (not something I’m too keen to do). However, if it’s something that the community shows much interest in, and the UE4 developers are not any keener to work on it than I am, then I suppose I could undertake the challenge.

In summation, I would really like to have a UInstancedSplineMeshComponent. Maybe you could get one for me for Christmas? :smiley:

Love you guys and I appreciate all the hard work that goes into the Engine. Let me know if there was a better place to post this.

Yes, that would be very helpful when it comes to performance!

Definitely, was just thinking about this and would also very much appreciate this feature! Or at least find a workaround to the performance problems, especially if you want to make many fences, roads, paths or rivers on a very large terrain.

hi guys, any news or workarounds?)

Any new development? This would be very good feature for our project.

Bump. Is this more harder to implement than it seems? Just wondering why it hasn’t yet been added?

I think this request contradicts the concept of instanced Meshes because instanced meshes are all identical so can be handled more low level by the GPU, but in the use case with splines, meshes cant be instanced because must be deformed by the Spline so each mesh in the row is different (so not instanced)

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