Check Out This Custom UE5 Tool For Quickly Creating Pipes

If you're into 3D modeling, you probably know that creating pipes can be a bit tricky. While simple shapes aren't necessarily hard, they can be tedious to build. As the structure becomes more complex, it gets more challenging to maintain smooth geometry and consistent detail scaling. Fortunately, automation tools can greatly streamline the process, especially when dealing with entire systems.

Senior Environment Artist Viljam Fändriks shared his work on Alara Prime, a free-to-play 4v4v4 tactical FPS by Fall Damage, demonstrating a custom Pipe Blueprint in Unreal Engine 5 that works with meshes and splines and supports lightmap baking.

It runs at construction time, utilizing Hierarchical Instanced Static Meshes (HISM) to reduce draw calls and minimize triangle overdraw for better performance. The primary motivation was to support lightmap baking, as volumetric lighting didn't achieve the desired level of visual fidelity. As Viljam shared, a Utility Blueprint handles the process, looping through Blueprint instances, splitting them into segments for more accurate bounds and LODs, and then baking everything cleanly into static meshes within the content browser.

Learn more about it here, and check out the Blueprint used to control every light fixture in Alara Prime, along with a custom shader and a fake volumetric fog mesh:

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