Today’s tip is one that will help speed up your blueprint workflow.

Did you know that you can quickly set in and out pins on custom events and functions using pre-existing variables?

If you would prefer to watch the video version, check it out here

Normally to make a pin on a custom event node you would need to: add a new variable, set the type, and then name it something relevant. As you can see below, this is a bit of a long process and can get tedious if you have multiple variables that you need to set up.

However, there is a much simpler way of doing this. As in the example below, if you drag out from a variable pin and hover over a custom event node, you will see Add Pin to Node. If you then release the mouse the pin will be auto-created. This is great because the pin will take the variable type (in our case below a float) as well as the name of the variable. You may want to adjust the name slightly but it is a far quicker process and a great place to start from.

As you can see below this can significantly speed up the process when adding multiple pins.

This also works inside functions, in the below example I am quickly setting up pins in the return of a function.

One thing I like to do is copy relevant variables around, pasting them into places where I need to have their values (or similar if I need their type). I quickly create pins with the method we talked about above and afterward I will delete them as they have served their purpose.

An interesting thing to note here is that if you try setting a return pin from a set variable node you will get the type but the name will not come across. So if you want this to work correctly you will need to use a get variable instead. As you can see in the example below:

These techniques are super useful and I use them all the time, especially the copying variables around then deleting them, to help speed up my blueprint workflow.

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