I wanted to share this tip I came across in the excellent Your First Game In Unreal Engine 5 tutorial.

When working with Blueprints you may need to combine several Static Mesh Components to act as a single object in your game world. It can be much easier to work with the Transform of a mesh if you can start with its Location and Rotation values all at 0. However, if you simply place your meshes in the Viewport and make them all direct children of the root component, their Location will be relative to the center of the Viewport. Take this door, which is made up of 3 Static Mesh Components:

The Wall Door mesh with the two door piece meshes, before using Scenes to achieve relative positioning

You can see in the Components window in the top left that the parts of the door SM_Door_R and SM_Door_L are children of the SM_Modular_WallDoor. That means their Transforms look like this:

Right Door Transform Left Door Transform
The right door Transform before using a Scene component The left door Transform before using a Scene component

You can see both have a non-zero value for Y. If we want our two door meshes to have Location and Rotation values of 0, we need to create two Scene Components to be their parents.

Start by clicking the Add button in the Components tab. Then click Scene in the dropdown menu that appears.

Selecting Scene from the Add menu in the Components tab

Name your first Scene Anchor_R and drag your SM_Door_R mesh onto it to make it the component’s child. Repeat these steps to create an Anchor_L and make it the parent of SM_Door_L.

Finally, make the values of the Location and Rotation Transforms of the two Anchors match their respective children. You can then change all the Location and Rotation values for the door meshes themselves to 0.

That’s it! Your Components tree should look like this when you’re done:

The Components tree of the door Blueprint when the two Scene Components have been correctly added.

Now you can easily move your meshes around manually or with animations, knowing they are starting out at zero. To see video of this being implemented, navigate to 01:04:53 in the tutorial linked at the beginning of this post.