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
- Calculate path and create an height incremented spline for a NPC bird to fly away.
- A camera flies through any house any floor without hitting a single object.
- A homing projectile follows a specific character or a magical whisp.
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.