I’m just trying to send a camera smoothly through a house with an end location.
I’ve used similar things in the past to this, but this seems brutal.
I have my start and end location. But Ive been wrestling with this for hours and I just can’t figure out how to make smooth splines.
This is my current blueprint.
Ok for later reference for anyone or myself, A few things to make life easier.
Things to rant about (Things I dont understand)
Why In gods earth are tangents never going where you think they do. why offer relative and world if your just going to change back when I click anything.
Why when changing the arrive or leave tangent manually does it disconnect from itself.
UPDATE:
Ok screw spline paths xD.
Im going to swap over to rig rail and find out a way to do a similar thing.
Hi there,
This will move smoothly and steady along spline for given duration. If you need to look camera to something you can basically use find look at rotation on tick, or use cinecamera to focus.
Tangent have nothing to do with camera when you arrange it that way its just spline tangent.
Another approach is to use some scene components to dynamically create a spline and you can auto arrange curves etc.
Another more nicer approach if you are going to use in dynamic environments like in quest etc. Which needs to fit in a bigger system with more complex setup and constraints, you can use ai to find path and generate spline on top, which is way more nicer approach and causes less pain with tangents etc, that you having.
Yeah, Okies yeah I’m back on splines. Rigs wasn’t what I was after.
okies cool, I made some adjustments to make it easier to manage in blueprints, thanks.
The big issue I’m having is the making the path itself is so unintuitive from the outset. My issue stems from not really understanding the relativeness from the tangent to the main key frame.
I’m trying to understand the workflow for splines. (A few things I’ve found just playing)
You position the key frames using either relative location for flowy spaces or more accurately to the world, World location for focusing (Or using the look nodes).
Then using tangents to angle/curve the key frame, You can’t change the tangent in world space or position it accurately. It’s relative to its key frame, and you’re changing it based on its parent key frame. the keyframe and tangents arent 2 seperate entities.
The tangent arrive and leave numbers are interesting and act weirdly. I initially thought they were positions in world/relative location, but they are essentially increasing and decreasing the aggressiveness of the curve in relation to its Euler angle.
Surprising how much this has confused me.
Yeah let’s be honest they are not super easy to use especially you will place hundreds of them on specific places in an open world map, can have some improvements for sure like in everything. However they are also a very essential tool for gameplay design and many things around it.
There are some plugins like this where the creation process is still manual for content creators so it lowers time spent on things.
If you having trouble with look angle of camera an easy way is to use get transform
I always prefer to generate spline using navmesh and agents. That way I can always have nice splines, following distance to obstacles, always snapped to ground or a constant distance, after generating with a custom function you can always check and tweak if necessary.
Tangent arrive and leave numbers if you are going to use should be calculated for next and previous spline points to avoid errors. With navmesh paths you can do things like
So if you have a navmesh bounds setup correctly you can do with it procedurally. Even if this is something that is going to be in a production game, it is possible to create a navpath, adjust navpath in every segment with an alghrotihm to find the most efficient place from the objects and recalculate points for a perfect spline with one click.
Think will make a blueprint proto to this topic.
This is the rat’s nest I’m trying to figure out, lol.
Ok sweet alot for me to unpack and research.
That link is interesting and has loads of good points in it. I’ll read through that too.
Its baffling how time consuming and difficult this is.
UPDATE:
Ok huge update. I deleted that bs line, started a new smooth one.
It follows the spline beautifully but updating the rotation as well as the location causes it to literally overly glue itself to the spline causing extremely exact crazy camera movements.
So I removed it and add a lerp rotator to aim where I want to end and tweek it to be smooth.
Works fantastically now. and looks great.
Yeah if it works it works, was busy with something but meanwhile also did an example movement with AI pathfinding.
Created a simple agent, navmesh settings, a sample apartment.
In agent I get a target actor, create a path to it, get points put on a spline, make movement ontop of spline with with timeline at designated flyby duration. OnUpdate I also use a simple Vinterp and RInterp to smooth the movement and its quite nice can be pushed further as tangent splines etc, would be better with a cinematic camera and boom also.
I used sharp corners but if you don’t turn 180+ degrees curve would already work out of box.
Script
Result
Wow, I am saving this for the future. This will be huge for a future project I was thinking of.
Thank you for the help and being so thorough. It’s a really good explanation.
Curious question,
How did you get the video to play in unreal? Sometimes I find myself needing to show someone but making a quick gif or video seems tricky to do quickly. The snip tool is great for quick accurate pictures, but I need something for gifs/videos.
https://obsproject.com/ is open source so let’s give love to obs
Video to animated GIF converter is also a independent developer with a free website converter.
