How to make FPS arms *correctly* follow Camera pitch without parenting ?

Development Character & Animation
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1

I’m currently working on an FPS project; i was planning on adding a Camera bone to the rig’s skeleton and parent Unreal’s camera to it so that i could manually key some natural head movement to my animations.

The issue I’m facing is that I am required to make the rig ( Simple arms ) a child of Unreal’s camera in order for the rig to correctly pitch up and down.

All other workarounds are either laggy, have incorrect pitch or will not allow me to independently move the camera.

For example, using Blendspaces/AimOffsets make the movement of the arms look extremely choppy and laggy, while also not following the camera’s pitch correctly ( Looking up result in the arms being slightly above the camera, Looking down does the inverse )

Every single tutorial and post related to this that I’ve seen online either ignores these problems, or they give up and make the Rig a child of the Camera.

Overall, I’m not looking for an exact fix if it isn’t possible, the result i am looking for is a camera that can move independently from the player mesh, while the player mesh correctly follows the player’s point of view.

I would greatly appreciate any help and contribution regarding this issue. Thank you.

2

So you want head bobbing or an independed look around with only the “head”?

3

Sorry about that, I realize now I wasn’t being very clear.

Essentially, I just want to have the camera be a child of the skeletal mesh so that I can animate the camera bone, only problem is that I can’t do that without losing the ability to correctly control the pitch rotation of the mesh itself.

To take a popular example, modern Call of Duty games implement your run of the mill FPS hip aim, but add flair to their reload animations by keying natural head movements to the camera.

4

Hmm :confused: I have no idea how you could handle this, I’m sorry.