How to locate instances in Unreal Engine 5’s Outliner?

By default, when you select a mesh in your scene, Unreal automatically highlights the mesh in the outliner window. However, if you attempt the same action with instances, you’ll notice that it yields no results. While pressing ‘F’ still puts the focus on the object, the highlight feature in the outliner still doesn’t trigger.

But here lies the real issue: Unreal Engine surprisingly lacks a built-in tool to highlight instances. What I’m here to offer is more of a workaround, but it’s much quicker than going through lists of items/objects whenever you need to find an instance whose name you can’t recall.

In the following screenshot, you can see that we actually have a filtering method for Unreal’s outliner window. If you set it to ‘Filter by Blueprint’ only, it will display all the blueprint actors placed in your scene. It’s still not the optimal way to find your instance, but I’ve noticed that many people aren’t actually aware of the filtering option and I thought this would be worth sharing.

Filtering by Blueprint only in Unreal Engine 5

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