Hey everyone,
I’m pulling my hair out trying to get camera shakes working smoothly in my first-person project, and I’m hoping someone here has cracked this before. I’m using Unreal Engine 5.
I’m not using the usual procedural camera shakes (like Perlin noise or whatever). I’ve got a bunch of camera animations that I made with tracked phone movements, and I really want to use these. I’ve got separate animations for idle, walking, and running.
My current setup is pretty basic. In my character blueprint, I’m using Client Start Camera Shake to trigger these animations (which are Camera Animation Sequences). The problem is, this is giving me two major headaches:
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The shakes are additive, so they don’t actually move the camera relative to the player controller. This means anything attached to my camera (like a flashlight) doesn’t move with the shake, which looks totally broken.
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When I switch between animations (like going from walk to run), there’s zero blending. It just instantly jumps to the new animation. This creates a horrible snapping effect. It’s super jarring because while each animation starts at a neutral (0, 0, 0) position, the camera’s position and rotation alter slightly during the animation. When I switch, it snaps instantly from wherever the camera currently was in the previous animation back to that 0, 0, 0 starting point of the new animation.
I’ve tried a few things, but nothing’s really working the way I want. I’ve thought about somehow interpolating the camera’s transform back to a neutral position between shakes, but that feels like a hack, and I’m worried about it still looking janky. My ideal solution would be to smoothly blend between these camera animation sequences, kind of like how you’d blend animations on a character.
I think Anim Montages might be the way to go, but I’m a bit lost on how to set that up specifically for camera shakes, especially since I want the camera’s actual transform to change (not just be additive). I looked into creating a sort of custom camera component, but I am still having issues with that.
Has anyone successfully blended animated camera shakes like this? Any tips, blueprints, or general direction would be hugely appreciated. I’m really aiming for a smooth, polished feel, and this snapping is killing me.