Hello everyone, 3d artist here. I purchased a third person shooter template from a Dev to learn. I’m trying to turn it into a “true” first person shooter. I’ve seen many tutorials and it’s simple. However, in the dev kit, the third person camera is using a spring arm, (in the tutorials, this isn’t the case) when I detach the camera from the spring arm and then place it as a child of character and attach it to the head bone, it sort of works. What’s the problem?
or run in any direction using w,a,s,d, the camera stays facing forward instead of the direction that the character is facing, I’m then able to see the character’s body. This doesn’t happen in all 10 tutorials I’ve seen of people turning 3rd person to “true” first person.
Can anyone out there please help me with this?
How can I make it so that my character’s arms and weapons are always on the center of the screen no matter where I turn?
Also, Any way to reduce head bobbing when moving sideways while aiming?
There is nothing “simple” about what you want to do. Appearances are deceiving.
As far as the problem at hand there is no right or wrong answer.
The likely best solution is to remove the head from the character, assemble it on the skeletal mesh at runtime, and set it to not render but cast shadow. You can then control what it does on reflections as well.
You can couple this with a negative value Spring (camera boom).
Attach the spring to the head bone. Set the value to -30.
Attach the camera to the spring’s socket.
Set the camera to detect collision / change the size of the test to match the approx size of the face.
That will help when the character tries to shove his face into walls.
Play with the spring value to get a good starting distance. 30 may be excessive.
Short of decoupling the head your only other option is to offset either the camera or the spring arm manually by however many units gets you past the geometry that is rendering inside the head (the model normals point that way).
Thank you for your reply. You’re right, there is nothing “simple” about what I was trying to do. I didn’t know what I was in for when I asked the question.
I wanted to achieve that “true” first person look but it won’t work with the ThirdPersonCharacter animations because they have too much weapon sway when walking or running, it wouldn’t look or feel like a smooth FP shooter. There’s also too much head wobble for the camera to be attached to the head.
There are ways around what I mentioned above but it requires extensive knowledge of blueprints and or c++, and I’m no coder.
I may settle with not being able to see my feet, or body. My end goal is to build a playable level while showcasing level design and environment art for my art portfolio, so I suppose I don’t have to go all out with the character.
I appreciate your advice but I think I’m gonna take the approach that is in the “ShooterGame” template. They added the ThirdPersonCharacter as a skeletal mesh to the FirstPersonCharacter and set it to not render. I’ll have to adjust the FPcharacter animations to fit the hands on my custom guns. I’ve planned out the process and what I need to do.
With that being said though, I’m having issues with my new approach. It involves Maya’s ArtV1. When I import FirstPerson Animations from UE4 to Maya, the character’s rig gets out of place. I made a detailed post about it.
If that’s something you have experience with, could you look at my new post?
I don’t know if this can help you now but, you can go into your project settings and search for Near clip plane. and set it to a value like 0.1 or 0 and it will reduce the chance of your camera clipping
