Changing springarm length at runtime

[HughWN]

I have a basic camera as a child actor to a spring arm that, itself, is a component of a Pawn.

After a lot of faffing about, I have concluded that apart from moving the camera (i.e., the Pawn) closer to the camera, a zoom effect could be achieved by changing the length of the spring arm.
Although it appears to change the value, nothing changes in the view. It’s similar to this thread.

Am I barking up the wrong tree?

Thanks,
Hugh

[Everynone]

@HughWN

Am I barking up the wrong tree?

Nope, this bit looks fine and so does sound the reasoning.

Although it appears to change the value, nothing changes in the view.

If the numbers do add up and this indeed already triggers, what is special about this child actor? Could there be something preventing it being moved around?

For starters. Are you sure you’re looking through a camera inside the child actor rather than using this Pawn’s point of view? These are 2 different things. Event though an actor has no dedicated camera component (like this Pawn), the engine will provide one.

[HughWN]

Aha! Good point.

I’ve added a Camera as a child component under the spring-arm so that the Pawn will select that. I’ll have a play but so far no luck with the spring arm. Camera movement and FoV change may have to do.

[EXODST]

You might want collision to be enabled for the spring arm depending on what you are doing, but maybe its getting blocked by something and preventing the change of the “Target Arm Length”.
It may be worth disabling the “Do Collision Test” option to see if that fixes it.

[HughWN]

Thanks. It turns out that it takes some pretty big numbers for a change in spring-arm length to make a difference. Lesson learned!