How to parent a camera to a skeletalMeshActor?

Development Character & Animation
1

I am trying to make a “passenger camera” for an animated skeletalMeshActor imported as an FBX into Unreal from Maya I would like the camera to have its position and orientation locked to that of the animated skeletalMeshActor, and on top of that, I would like to have the ability to add positional and rotational offsets. In traditional animation term, this would be a standard basic hierarchical transform.
I have tried many different approaches but so far have come up empty.

Attaching a First Person Character to the SkeletalMeshActor doesn’t work for me since it does not inherit the rotation.

My current approach is to create a Blueprint from a CameraActor and reference my SkeletalMeshActor into it through a variable. I then use a “GetSocketTransform” node to bring the SkeletalMeshActor’s transform into the Blueprint and connect it into a “SetActorTransform” node, which effectively copies my animation’s transforms to the CameraActor.

The behavior I am looking for would be to use the WASD keys to add +10 or -10 to my camera’s X and Z positional axes.

2

For the camera to stick on a point of theSkeletalMesh just create a socket and in the viewport select the camera and select your socket under Sockets > Parent Socket.

Then the camera will move with the actor.