The Settings Panel

The settings panel is the home base for everything Spline Juice. It’s a tabbed, freely-navigable settings menu (not a one-time wizard), so you can jump between tabs in any order and your edits stay.

Opening it

There are two entry points, both at edit time only (they disable themselves during Play / Simulate):

Right-click an actor in the viewport → Spline Juice → Edit Spline Juice Settings.
The Open Setup… button on the component in the Details panel.

There is only ever one panel window. Re-opening it just focuses the existing one.

It follows your selection

The panel tracks the viewport selection. As you select, deselect, or swap actors, it retargets to the Spline Juice actors in the current selection, and every edit applies to exactly that set:

Select multiple Spline Juice actors → edit them all together.
Select a plain mesh actor that has no component yet → the panel offers an Add Spline Juice button to attach one.
Select nothing relevant → it shows a Nothing selected message but stays open.

(Selection changes are ignored during Play / Simulate.)

The tabs

Tab	What it’s for
Meshes & Materials	Pick target meshes and the material slots to make deformation-capable, then Generate / Update the deform variants. Static and skeletal mesh slots are both supported.
Presets	The animated preset gallery: built-in effects plus your saved presets. Pick one and Apply. See Presets.
Tuning	The Animation and Deformation settings, edited live.
Behavior	The behavior curves (timing, stretch, size, twist, squash, wobble, inflate, shake, melt, bulge) plus the optional Assembly controls.
Group (2+ actors)	Aim a group of splines together and stagger their playback into one wave. See Group Stagger.
Pieces	Split the mesh into rigid pieces for the assembly effect, preview, and commit.

Most tabs apply instantly: Tuning, Behavior, and Group edits take effect the moment you change them, on every selected actor. Only the two tabs that author assets carry explicit buttons: Meshes & Materials (Generate / Update) and Pieces (Commit).

The panel always opens on Meshes & Materials, except the Bake Pieces… buttons, which open it straight on the Pieces tab.

Live Preview

A Live Preview toggle sits in the header. Switch it on and the deformation plays in the level viewport with no Play / Simulate, so any behavior-curve or tuning edit shows immediately (each edit restarts the preview from the top with the new values).

A Loop checkbox beside it controls playback: leave it on (the default) to loop continuously, or turn it off to play through once and hold the final pose. Loop off reads best on the Presets and Group tabs, where the effect settles and holds.

It’s purely visual and fully reversible: the original materials and bounds are restored when you:

toggle it off,
close the panel,
save the level, or
enter Play / Simulate (it auto-stops there).

Right-clicking actors in the level viewport opens a Spline Juice submenu. Every action works on the whole selection in one undo step:

Action	What it does
Add Deform Component	Attach the component to every selected mesh actor.
Edit Spline Juice Settings	Open the settings panel on the selection.
Reset Spline	Restore the default generated spline shape.
Ground Spline to Floor	Project each spline point straight down onto the geometry below, so the path drapes over terrain.
Group / Ungroup / Select Group	Form, leave, or re-select a named wave group. See Group Stagger.
Push Setup to Blueprint	Bake a placed actor’s setup into its Blueprint class, so every placed instance of that Blueprint gains the effect.
Remove Deform Component	Remove the component and restore the original materials.

Re-generating an existing setup

Run Generate again on an already-configured component and the panel detects the existing setup. The action row shows an Existing setup found status and offers two choices:

Update (primary): reuse the existing generated variant assets and just re-sync the wiring. Idempotent and non-destructive.
Recreate from source: force-delete the generated variants and rebuild them from the current source materials. Use this after editing an original material’s graph so the change is picked up. Destructive to the generated assets only (not undoable).