Alright, I figured out the problem. Thanks to @Erasio for reminding me to check my camera update function as it led me to the solution.
The object turning my camera sideways at first appeared to be the PlayerCameraManager, as I noticed it’s rotation changed from -90 yaw to 180 yaw. Of course, as luck would have it, directly modifying the rotation of that didn’t do anything, so I took it a step up to the PlayerController, and modified the ControlRotation. This worked only for a split second, as I only called this in my respawn function and not every update/frame. I made the same call in my camera’s tick event, and the it worked like gangbusters. Side note for anyone who is trying to achieve something similar, make sure that you set control rotation in your respawn script in addition to the tick event, otherwise, you’ll have a few random frames looking at the weird angle again until the tick event is reached in your camera. Lastly, to avoid confusion in the pictures below, Piran is the name of the pawn the player controls.
Respawn functionality in the GameMode event graph
Camera Blueprint event graph
Find pawn function
