Walking into and out of a cinematic matinee

Hi there,

Due to issues with diving into and climbing out of water cleanly (Unreal Engine 4 Tutorial - Quick Swimmable Water - YouTube) I’ve decided to create two small cinematic matinees to take care of this issue. I have 2 problems however:

  1. How do I get the characters location to be the start of the matinee, or how to create a transition between the two? (so there is a smooth and seamless transition into the cinematic)

  2. How can I orientate the characters view so im looking in the same direction as at the end of the matinee? (im half way there with ‘set actor location’ but I end up looking in the same direction as when i enter the matinee trigger box—which some times has me looking at the ceiling or a wall instead of forward)

Here are my two blueprints:


Thanks for the help,

Jim.

If you want the camera movements for the Matinee to be fixed, but just want a smooth transition into them, you can do it this way:

Right-click on the keyframe in the director track which determines which camera to view through, and set a transition time. This is how long it will take to blend from wherever the current view is to the camera that’s being set in the director track. Unfortunately, this only works for transitioning into camera views, and can’t be used for transitioning back to the player at the end of the Matinee. But if you’re using an FPS pawn, it’s possible to match the player’s orientation to the camera at the end of the Matinee like this:

So it’s getting the rotation of the camera used in the Matinee and applying that to the player’s control rotation, then setting the pawn’s location to match the camera’s location too. Depending on how your FPS camera is set up, you may need to offset the location a bit to account for eye height settings, but I think by default an FPS pawn’s location is the same as its camera component’s world location.

Hope that works out for you :slight_smile:

Excuse my lack of basics here but when I right click and set transition time it does this weird thing where the camera jumps to the second or third movement key, hangs there, then continues to play out the rest of the matinee.

Also for the second part of your explanation I have no idea how to implement this. Can I do this in my trigger box blueprint? I just dont even know how to bring up the yellow MatineeActor1 box… Sorry :frowning:

No worries - could you maybe post a screenshot of your Matinee window? If you have a director group that looks like what I have, then setting a transition time of 1 or 2 on the first keyframe should result in a smooth blend from your player’s camera view to whatever camera actor you’re using for the Matinee. I’m not sure what the problem could be without having a better idea of what you’ve got set up, though.

The yellow MatineeActor1 box is called a “Matinee controller”, and it goes in the Level Blueprint. With your matinee actor selected in the level, you can right-click in the Level Blueprint and should see an option to add a Matinee controller for it. This will include the “Finished” pin that fires when the Matinee ends, and can also include pins for any events you might want to add via an event track.