UE5 bring static mesh close to the camera for inspection

Hi,

I have a SideViewCamera and when I click on a static mesh I want it to lerp position and scale towards the centre of the camera but I need a way to determine when it at the correct position and scale to take up the majority of the vertical or horizontal screen size.

Any suggestions on how to accomplish this. I have tried to having a mesh attached to the camera but it doesnt feel quite right

Thanks in advance

I tried to understand what you want and put this project up in case you can use it.

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We have this in a few projects. Many ways to do it, but here’s what we did:

  • PlayerController has multiple “player states” it can be in, like Walking, Paused, or Inspecting, all deterministic (one at a time)
  • Inspecting is a player state
  • During Inspecting state, player movement is stopped, and the inspected object zooms to a named socket location on the player character
  • The named sockets to zoom to are on a mesh attached to the player’s current character, which is centered at the character’s camera
  • the inspected object simultaneously lerps toward the socket in front of the camera, and shrinks to a designated amount (there is no choice but to set this shrink value up per-object)
  • By some key or button press, the player exits Inspection mode, and the inspected object lerps back to its original location
  • we limited “Inspected objects” to actors only, components are doable as well, but will require different handling

Uhh yeah that’s a lot and it takes some thought to implement, and details will certainly vary according to your game framework. Especially the UI stuff.