Little Nightmares Camera Research

Hi everyone, I recently played Little Nightmares, a game made in UE4. I couldnt help but notice how awesome and responsive the camera is in this game, here’s a link to the first level to give you an idea of what I mean if you’ve not played it.

I’m wondering how a camera like this could be created with blueprints, since we all know just sticking a camera to a spring arm is pretty boring and unintuitive.

The main features I’ve picked up on are;

  • Some swaying, like a boat to make to make the setting of the game more believable
  • Smooth rotations to the camera to look slightly towards some objects (I’m not sure if this is shown in this video, but it usually happens when something major happens, like a monster appearing in the scene)
  • Following the player per room
  • Ability for the player to look around, feels like you’re ‘throwing’ the camera and it smoothly springs back

From my experience, I doubt this was done using a spring arm, but it may be possible by doing a lot of calculations. I’ve looked into player camera managers, although I’m not sure if this is necessary for something like this (I don’t have much experience with this either - there doesn’t seem to be many tutorials around).

Feel free to comment on any of this! Any input is much appreciated. I also reccomend checking out the game if you haven’t already it’s an excellent example of what UE4 can do.

hi! I don’t know how experienced you are with blueprints or programming in general so excuse me if my answer is not what you are looking for. You can use the “look at” node to output what rotation you should give to the camera to be pointing at the player. You can also change the camera your are “viewing” trough using the “set view target”. Using this set view target will allow you to transition smoothly trough any camera you want in the scene or even onto other actors. You can also make the cameras move using matinee or camera animations like you would for head bobbing in an fps game. Hope that helps a bit!

Also I have a few videos I did wich could help you, I believe camera zonnes start at the end of video 12 and ends in video 14. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xTBair5DyE&list=PLom3andNXCSKC9vFOht1KJsd0iURjEBvO&index=1

Thanks for your answer! Those videos look like they will come in handy! I also didn’t know there was a look at node and I think you’re right about the game transitioning between cameras for each room rather than one camera changin it’s position like I originally thought, cheers!