Lesson Summary

In this lesson, we covered:

• Add a camera to our character.
• Set up the camera to fit the needs of our game genre.

⚠️ If you took a break between the previous lesson and this one, when you open your character blueprint you may find that it looks different than the video. Just click on Open Full Blueprint Editor and you will return to the normal blueprint editor. This happens everytime you create a blueprint and dont modify anything inside it beside the values of the properties already in it.

What did we do?

✅ Updated for UE 5.4

Possess a Character in the Level

• Select a character and go to the Details panel.
• Search for Possess, and in the Auto Possess Player dropdown, change it to Player 0.
• Now, whenever you press play, you will be controlling the character.

Add a Camera to your character

• Inside the character blueprint, go to the Components tab to the left and select the Root component called Capsule Component (CollisionCylinder).
• Click on + Add, type in camera and choose the one that says Camera.

Add a Spring Arm to your character and attach the camera to it

• Select the Capsule Component.
• Click on + Add, search and select the Spring Arm.
  
• Select the camera, and in the Details panel zero out the Location and Rotation (change the values of Location and Rotation to X = 0.0, Y = 0.0, and Z = 0.0).
• Drag and drop the Camera component on top of the Spring Arm component to attach it.

Position the camera to fit our game genre

• Click on the Spring Arm component and change the Rotation to X = 0.0, Y = -40.0, and Z = 0.0.
• Change the Target Arm Length value to 700.

Hotkeys learned

Unreal Editor

Play this level in the active level editor viewport: Alt + P

Unreal Engine Terminology

Possess: In Unreal, the player and the character are not connected. In order for a player to control a character, it first needs to possess it. That way, the inputs will be sent to the correct character in the correct moment.

Root: Usually in terms of Root Component or Root Object. It refers to the first item in the list. In a blueprint components list, the root component will determine the blueprint location, rotation and scale in the level. All the other components will follow the root component, but they can have their own Transform (Location, Rotation, and Scale) relative to the Root Component.

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