Parenting a camera to an object

Development Cinematics & Media
1

Hey guys,

I work in VFX so I’m very unfamiliar with Unreal Engine. I have to record two shots of a game landscape, both have a sinple camera movement.
The camera movement is just a simple rotation around a fixed point (while pointing towards it). In my dcc program (cinema 4d in my case) I would simply place the camera in position, drop in a null, parent the camera to the null and rotate the null to get the camera movement I want.

I tried the same thing in UE, droped in an empty actor and a camera, put the camera in position, parented the camera to the empty actor and rotated the empty actor to get the desired movement (I recorded the keyframes of this animation in Sequencer).
That all works fine… untill the level is saved. For whatever reason UE will unparent the camera and drop it somewhere in the level. I can reparent the camera again (by draging it onto the empty actor in the outliner) but it will again unparent it when saving the level. Even when I want to record the animation I’ve made with Sequencer UE will unparent the camera.

I’m at my wits end. I have no idea how to keep the camera parented. What am I doing wrong here?

1 Like
2

I would use a Blueprint Actor for that - inside the blueprint you can do all kinds of things like have cameras - non rendering arrows to show direction, etc… and then you can drop THAT actor in the scene and if you rotate it the camera should be attached like you’re expecting

3

Hey.

I had the same issue.

This is the reason:
The sequencer spawns any cameras that are made inside the sequencer.
It will re-spawn these over and over again and cannot have links to anything as any links will be destroyed on each spawn.

solution:
rmb on camera in sequencer/convert to spawnable.
Now the level owns the camera and it is not re-spawned over and over again.
It can now be parented and whatever you need.

2 Likes
4

i fix it by add it to empty actor

5

Thank you! This fixed it. However, you mean to say “convert to posessable.”