I’m trying to do something that is just a little outside the normal UE4 workflow and I’m struggling to find a paradigm that makes sense for it with actors and components.
I want to have a base object, with some functionality that represents a Camera and contains a Spring Arm component and a Camera component, with the Camera parented under the spring arm. I want users to be able to add this to Blueprints and in a level, and have a top-level object combining the spring arm and camera that can be passed in to functions on the camera manager (I want to animate between these, incorporating the spring arm into the animation as a camera boom).
On first blush, my Camera object could be an actor that I add to the scene directly and then use Child Actor components to add to other blueprints. The problem with that workflow is that the actor in Child Actor component is not directly viewable or editable, i.e. the user cannot actually see the camera in Blueprint editor, move it around and preview it’s viewpoint.
So I wanted to do this with a purely component based solution. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, you can’t nest components in the Blueprint editor, you can only do so on an actor. I can add the subcomponents in construction but then they don’t show up in the hierarchy (IIRC). The best I’ve been able to do is have a component that finds the spring arm and camera within its children at startup but that workflow isn’t great as the user has to know how to construct these properly or they won’t work.
Is there some obvious solution here that I’m missing?
