Request: Duplicate Folders (In the Scene Outliner)

I am amending this question as per the request of Ben Halliday.

I want to duplicate folders in the “Scene Outliner” instead of just their contents. Right now the scene outliner has very poor organization capabilities. Creating allot of actors is necessary during the initial scene development phase, as there are often overlapping actors occupying the same space. I use this method to keep modular pieces, like rooms, groups of rooms, halls, Foyets, caves, etc.

Not being able to duplicate folders in the scene outliner forces me to make long names for every single actor, so that when I duplicate a set of actors, I can keep their location in the scene straight. Effectively what i’m doing is adding the entire folder structure to the name of each actor. This is annoying and bad for rapid production.

Is this request more clear? Let me know.

Regards,

Hi master_rigel,

Thanks for the feedback. This is currently not possible inside the editor but our developers are looking into this feature. As a workaround, you can go into Windows Explorer and duplicate the folders there, then reload the project to show your changes in the Content Browser.

Have a good day.

Thanks, TJ

TJ. I’m sorry. This isn’t right. I don’t have a problem with the content browser. My issue is with the scene outliner. There’s no folder structure in Explorer for the folder structure. Can we get some kind of duplication of folders in the Scene Outliner please.

I have amended this post, and am resubmitting it wit a comment. The scope of the request is more clear now.

Regards,

Hi master_rigel,

Yes, that is much clearer and I’m sorry I misunderstood the first time. After testing your workflow, I can see how copying folders and their assets within the Scene Outliner could be very handy. I will ask the developers look into this.

Thanks for the feedback, TJ

. Thanks for the response. If you want I can upload a sample project and show you exactly what I am doing to work around the limitations of the workflow. I should have probably done that to begin with. smacks head I haven’t been active on development of software for a long time (several years). I guess I’m a bit shabby on protocol. Thanks for submitting this to the developer team.

Regards,

I totally get Master_Rigels point and I totally second it.

We are talking about the world outliner not the content browser. So while editing a map, the World outliner where you can manage actors in the map → That one.

We need to be able to duplicate folders. For example, I have modular stuff (a room with individual meshes inside) i wanna duplicate the whole room and the stuff inside it so, in order to do that, I must create a sub folder before hand. Then i go to the initial folder, right lick and select all ascendants, (alt + move) duplicate all actors, and while they are still selected in the world outliner, I take advantage of this situation and click and drag them in the initially created folder. This process is unnatural,

So, to duplicate folders, we should be able to right-click a folder and choose to select entire folder (not just “all ascendants” excluding the folder it is in), alt+move would automatically duplicate the folder and add a +01 numbering and have all the new children inside keep their original hierarchy. Having a hotkey do that would also be very nice and useful. (example: I click a folder, hit Ctrl+D then bam, folder duplicated and duplicates auto-selected, i can move them around)

Some other annoying things i have found over the time

-While a folder is selected, creating a new asset should be automatically sent in said folder (not in root folder). If no folder is selected, then throw it in root.

-If I click on an actor and drag him up or down, the list does not automatically scroll when at the tab upper/lower border. I must use the mouse wheel to scroll. When the list is long this is pretty annoying. A fast auto scroll when mouse approaches top/bottom border would be very handy.

THANKS TO THE DEVS FOR UE4 LOVE YOU PEOPLE

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Is there any update for this? I too have run into this problem where I want to manage multiple actors at once by interacting with the folder they’re in and duplicate the folder to make more instances of these clusters.

Hey GhostRavenstorm,

The feature request (JIRA UE-1107) was marked as ‘Won’t Fix’ by the developers because the implementation on the back-end outweighed the benefit of the feature itself.

If we have more users asking for this feature, then maybe we can reopen the report for reconsideration. Feel free to make a post on the Forums as well to gauge interest and direct them here.

This feature was requested again more recently Unreal Engine Issues and Bug Tracker (UE-30200) and the issue has been moved to the backlog.

I really want this too UE is already at version 4.19.2 and we still can’t do this…

This would be a very useful feature. In fact I can’t believe that it’s not already a feature.

Has there been any movement on this topic? I have about 100 arches with parts that I would like to group and duplicate.

Duplicating a folder would be so much easier! Thanks.

I’m working now on 4.27 and the only thing I found useful is to right click on the folder that contains other subfolders and choosing “Duplicate Hierarchy”. It does the job done, except that not really. When there are a lot of subfolders, some of them are not being copied, leaving you with the mess that you have to manually clean up anyway.

I haven’t checked if it got fixed in never versions though.