Hi there,
I'd like to be able to get the aximmetry camera to follow animation from an actor in unreal, but still be able to use camera tracking. My team has been trying to get this working for a long time and we have a shoot next week (LED Wall) which requires actors being in a car, moving down a road.
In the past I achieved this by animating the entire scene around the car, which was a painful process. We also managed to do some hack-y stuff within the camera blueprint but it was far from perfect.
Is there an easy way to do this? I've tried obviously parenting in world outliner, and also using 'attach actor to actor' nodes inside the level blueprint but none are working.
Any help would be much appreciated!
Kind regards,
Joe
Hi Joe,
The easiest way is to animate the car's movement within Aximmetry.
You can use the Sequencer module to animate the movement. And then connect the animated position of the car's movement to the Base Cam Transf input pin of the LedWall compound. Before connecting to the pin, you can offset this position with a Scene Node module, as you probably don't want the camera's base position to be at the same position as the car. After that, you need to get the animated position of the car in Unreal with a Get Aximmetry Transformation. It would look like this in Aximmetry:
However, if you really need to animate/run the camera in Unreal. Then the above solution won't be good. As you said you can try editing the camera blueprint or animating the entire scene around the car.
In theory, there should be no problem with editing the blueprint of Aximmetry's Led Wall camera in Unreal. Unlike Virtual and Tracked Camera's billboard, there is nothing in the Led Wall camera compound that should affect how you use up the Camera's position in Unreal.
So, you could search "Camera Transform" in the Led Wall camera blueprint and offset all the "Get Aximmetry Transformation ... Cam Transform" with the car's position before the Led Wall blueprint uses it:
Note that if you edit an Aximmetry Camera blueprint, at each update you might need to re-add these changes or skip updating the camera blueprint.
If you instead animate the entire scene around the car, what you should do is that you still animate the car in the first place. But you don't apply this animation to the car when playing back in Aximmetry, instead, you take the inverse of the resulting transformation from the animation and apply that to all other objects in the Unreal Scene.
The problem when moving the whole scene instead of just moving the car is that some shaders, particles, dynamically created objects, or post-process effects (motion blur) might react badly.
If you are stuck somewhere, feel free to detail where you got stuck and we will try to help you.
Parenting in the world outliner should be enough to move every object. However, don't forget to set the parent to Moveable:
Warmest regards,