This post originally appeared on my personal blog, and has been ported over here with a few edits.
In this second developer diary post about Unreal Engine’s Gameplay Cameras plugin, I want to talk about the most visible change you’ll see in 5.6, which is how camera assets are organized.
In UE 5.5, you have the Camera Asset which contains the Camera Director, the Shared Transitions, and a list of Camera Rigs that it can use (see bottom left panel in the screenshot below).
This post originally appeared on my personal blog, and has been ported over here with a few edits.
Since early 2024 I have been partially working on a new project at Epic Games: a “proper” camera system1 for the Unreal Engine, so that anybody can make cool-looking cameras for their games! It came out with UE 5.5 a couple of months ago, albeit in a firmly “Experimental” role, and is somewhat unimaginatively named “Gameplay Cameras”. As I’m working on many improvements and additions for UE 5.6, I figured I would start a developer diary to let anybody interested in cameras know what’s up!
But first, here’s a little trailer video I made, using the Game Animation Sample Project, to hopefully whet your appetite:
About two-thirds of what you see in the video is available in UE 5.5, although the UI and workflow may look different as I improve, fix, and polish things up for UE 5.6. You can find it all under the “Gameplay Cameras” plugin, and there’s even a little bit of documentation on it, even though we usually don’t provide documentation for “Experimental” plugins. Of course, I’ll go into more details into future articles. Just be aware that the version in UE 5.5 is an early look with non-final workflows, missing features, and various limitations that make it, well, “Experimental”, and therefore unsuitable for production.
So far I’ve been working for about a year on this, but as I’m still also working on Sequencer, what you can see in Github at the time I’m writing this article represents maybe six months of that, minus holidays and the like. I’ll continue working part-time between cameras and cinematics for the foreseeable future. If you have questions or feedback about Gameplay Cameras, I’d love to hear it, and my contact information isn’t hard to find… I just won’t guarantee a timely reply! That’s what UDN is for.
My new year’s resolution, so to speak, is to try and post developer diary updates for Gameplay Cameras here about once a week. But as someone cleverly said: “this isn’t a promise to you… this is a promise to me“. See you next week! Maybe!