📌Introduction

What is Unreal Prefabs ?

Unreal Prefabs is an Unreal Engine 5 plugin that empowers you with prefab composition in a similar way Unity and Child Actor Components does, while being safer and staying in the Unreal Engine workflow. It supports singleplayer and multiplayer projects.

To make it short, this means turning any Actor Blueprint into a prefab with customizable spawn parameters and properties. It works out of the box in both Blueprint and C++, with editor previews and easy setup. Giving your team a faster and more maintainable workflow.

This plugin was designed and built after years of Unity and Unreal Engine experience. Many of the unavoidable UE pitfalls were considered and this plugin will solve the important ones.

Simple high level view of the plugin features

• Made for Blueprint and C++ users. Making it suitable for Blueprint Only or C++ projects.

• Any actor class can be used as a prefab by other classes as long as it has a BP subclass of it.

• For each Prefab Reference Component (PRC) you add in an actor BP, you can select any actor BP class that will be used as the "prefab actor".

• Editor preview of the given "prefab actor" class for all found PRCs (in the BP Editor and in the Level Editor). With many preview settings.

• Spawn parameters (Default and customs) per PRC. These control how a "prefab actor" is spawned at runtime.

• Custom Properties per PRC, shared to the available spawned Prefab Source Component (PSC). This allows you to define what properties a "prefab actor" has, as well as set default and per-PRC values. You should place one PSC on any actor that is used as a "prefab actor" to be able to get the properties.

• Built to support modification and extensions. Easily customize the plugin editor & runtime behavior through the plugin settings and custom BP/C++ overrides.

Examples of use cases

• A house actor Blueprint, with inside multiple rooms (each a Blueprint), each rooms has some other components and other actor Blueprints (for example: a BP Door, BP Light Switch, ...).

• A tree BP which randomly picks what BP fruit to spawn on each branch.

• A BP door with a BP pressure plate or a BP button.

And so much more...

FAQ

Why should I use this plugin over Child Actor Components ?

First of, Child Actor Components have many issues that makes them unsafe to use and maintain, especially in big productions (see this article about it from Epic Games).

Meaning Child Actor Components should ONLY be used for very simple things, making it unsuitable for most "prefab" composition cases.

Why should I use this plugin over other plugins?

Other plugins force you into their pipeline. This one doesn’t.

This plugin adds powerful prefab support without introducing custom asset types or forcing you to change your existing workflow. It leverages Unreal’s native Actor and Component system, so your team can keep working the way you already do with only slight adjustments.

Unlike other solutions that locks you into rigid pipelines, this plugin is designed to be flexible and production-friendly. It’s built to integrate smoothly into Blueprint or C++ projects, supporting real-world team needs without getting in your way and allowing specific needs through various settings and custom entry points/overrides.

Add the plugin to your project, adjust your assets without reworking them and keep working on new things!

This plugin seems to add a lot of overhead, is it optimized?

To keep it brief and simple, all this plugin do under the hood at runtime is spawning the given "prefab actor" with the given spawn parameters (and more). So the only true "overhead" of this plugin is the amount of actor components (PRC, PSC ...) you will have to add across your actors.

This means that plugin doesn't do anything special that your project without the plugin would do if you manually placed (or spawned) the actor instances.

Basic recommended "optimized" spawn methods can be used to ease high amount of spawning prefabs such as async loading, deferred spawning or spawning a fixed amount across multiple frames. All of these can be found and used in the provided spawn parameters.

Most of the plugin power comes from its editor tools, which don't exist in a packaged build.