AC-130 camera movement help

Hello all, I’m working on a concept that follows the idea of an AC 130 gunship regarding camera movement. I need to be able to move in a circle or oval motion, while giving the camera the option to move up down in left and right while maintaining position in the flight path. I have a few ideas in mind, but I want to make sure My methods don’t bog the game down.

can I move the camera along the spine that is repeatable and allows the camera to move in the directions freely like I’m hoping for.
Using a spring arm, I use a tick function that moves the rotation at the base creating a circle.
I use target locations on the level script and move to each one, which moving in a circle smoothly would require a lot of them.
If I’m overthinking this and there is a simpler way to do this, please feel free to let me know. I am doing all of this in blueprints.

can I move the camera along the spine
that is repeatable and allows the
camera to move in the directions
freely like I’m hoping for.

Yes, a closed spline will work and would be a flexible, reusable solution with plenty of control. Especially if you want to move something in a shape more elaborate than a mundane circle.

You could clamp the camera angles with the camera manager, you have one by default but it can be overridden with your own in the Player Controller; create one in the Content Browser:

336155-screenshot-2.png

It allows you to clamp pitch, yaw, roll and add camera shakes, so that could work well here.

I have a link somewhere on AH to the relative setup like this, I’ll post it if I find it.


Another way of moving stuff in a circle is to have a dummy scene component, offset the mesh and rotate the dummy:

336157-screenshot-4.png

Image from Gyazo

Thank you! I’ll work on this tonight!

After further review of everything, I found by mistake that there is a pawn rotating movement component that can be added to the camera Pawn. From there, I can just control the rotation rate and it does everthing else from there.